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sterling8 's review for:
The Fuller Memorandum
by Charles Stross
So the Laundry series continues. You'll need to read The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue to really understand all the backstory in this book, which features an unobtrusive civil servant who incidentally exorcises demons as part of his job description. Also, in this book, there seems to be more momentum gathering for a related series of books, as opposed to two almost stand-alone novels. Villains who get away, a superior with an interesting inner life, possible long-term plots threads.
This book plays with the tropes in the typical 80's Cold War novel. I'm not familiar with the author that Stross was particularly paying homage to, since I believe he was British and not as popular on our side of "the pond". But I could be wrong and it's just a gap in my knowledge. So, because it's a Cold War novel, the Russians have to be involved. There's a mole in the agency, people are worried about giving the Russkies too much information, and there's a document which both bad guy sides want desperately to possess. There's also fun poked at bureaucracy (Bob finally has a decent manager, about which he makes an Austinian play on the "IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" quote. Cute.
Why the book didn't get 5 stars: Bob is forced to be stupid on several occasions in order to move the plot forward. He is attacked three different times during the book, but never seems to get his act together with proper self-defense preparations. I'm not sure how much I liked how the climactic scene went, either. I also didn't care that his wife sticks to lemonade instead of drinking alcohol when she's working. Stross moves fast over some points in the story, giving innuendos for the reader to parse, but then doesn't quite trust the reader to figure it out and goes back and explains it all. Maybe his editor made him do that, I don't know.
But I love the Laundry series, and am looking forward to seeing where it takes us next.
This book plays with the tropes in the typical 80's Cold War novel. I'm not familiar with the author that Stross was particularly paying homage to, since I believe he was British and not as popular on our side of "the pond". But I could be wrong and it's just a gap in my knowledge. So, because it's a Cold War novel, the Russians have to be involved. There's a mole in the agency, people are worried about giving the Russkies too much information, and there's a document which both bad guy sides want desperately to possess. There's also fun poked at bureaucracy (Bob finally has a decent manager, about which he makes an Austinian play on the "IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" quote. Cute.
Why the book didn't get 5 stars: Bob is forced to be stupid on several occasions in order to move the plot forward. He is attacked three different times during the book, but never seems to get his act together with proper self-defense preparations. I'm not sure how much I liked how the climactic scene went, either. I also didn't care that his wife sticks to lemonade instead of drinking alcohol when she's working. Stross moves fast over some points in the story, giving innuendos for the reader to parse, but then doesn't quite trust the reader to figure it out and goes back and explains it all. Maybe his editor made him do that, I don't know.
But I love the Laundry series, and am looking forward to seeing where it takes us next.