This was, quite simply, the most fun I’ve had reading scifi in a fair old while.
Brasyl is a tale in three parts, set in three different time periods, in… Brazil (surprise surprise).
Something I read in the Guardian awhile back was a review of a detective novel that stated, categorically, that we need a little more escapism in our reading. The idea being that we can take something of a metaphorical holiday while we take our metaphorical holiday in print. Brasyl fulfils that by immersing the reader in a fictional Sao Paulo, the deep Amazonian rainforest, and modern Rio De Janerio.
And that’s all I’m saying. This book as a few spinners bounced at you, just to keep you on your toes, but is generally straight down the line. But in mentioning the spinners, they aren’t enough to put you off the reading altogether, unlike another scifi read recently finished, 2012, the most god-awful book imaginable.
The trouble with 2012 was that it took everyday Judeo-Christian mythology, mixed it up with every freaking X-Files cliché you can imagine, threw in an alarming amount of rape-fetishism, and spewed it out, half-digested, into print. The mythology of Brasyl is plainly there to see, but it sits just to the side of your vision, a reminder.
Awesome.
20 September, 2009 at 8:45 pm
McDonald is one of the lesser-heralded of those UK sci-fi authors; although he’s been around for a long time. I didn’t like Brasyl as much as I liked his Indian novel (“River of Gods”) of a few years back – though it was a lot more conventional both in narrative structure and subject matter.
Also: “Desolation Road” – sometimes suggested as a counterpoint to those Kim Stanley Robinson Mars stories you found so boring. Desolation Road is beautifully written, like some lyrical story of the Old West. Recommended – there’s one beat up copy in the library…
20 September, 2009 at 9:14 pm
i stayed with a family in texas that had strong links to brazil, so found the book very evocative. enough that i’m wanting to read ‘river of gods’ soonish.
and re: mars. saw some photos of the red planet recently that triggered the imagination, and made that book not seem quite so bad.
20 September, 2009 at 10:42 pm
I don’t care if the plot of 2012 sucks, I’m so going to see that movie.
21 September, 2009 at 6:49 am
actually… that’s exactly what it was like.
the da vinci code.