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A review by xterminal
Maul by Tricia Sullivan
4.0
Tricia Sullivan, Maul (Night Shade, 2006)
Maul is everything I don't like about a book wrapped up in one package. So why is it that this thing works so very, very well? I don't have an answer to that, and I probably never will. And I'm not the only one that thought this, given some of the negative reviews I've read of the book. Sometimes, though-- it happens far more often in music-- you throw together all the stuff that makes a song pure crap and come out with absolute genius. Look at Better than Ezra's “A Lifetime” or Vertical Horizon's “Everything You Want”. It's rare that it happens in book form, but it does every once in a while. Maul is one of those books. It tosses together a vocabulary that makes next to no sense half the time (and weighs itself down with dialect all too often), uses a painful cliché as its turning point, is way too in love with its own postmodern flair, stops the action on a fairly regular basis to inject social commentary, and is desperately predictable. And yet, somehow, you put it all into the meatgrinder and what comes out the other end is delicious.
The book is divided into two parallel storylines. One deals with Sun, a Korean-American who, with two of her friends, is forced to go to the mall one Saturday morning (who's doing the forcing you find out later; too complicated to get into in a thousand words), where, thanks to one of her friends, she finds herself in a shootout with the city's toughest girl gang. The other, set in a world where a virus has wiped out most of the men, centers on Meniscus, a male clone who is a lab rat for designer genetic weaponry. He's autistic and noncommunicative, and Madeline, his handler, keeps him docile with a VR program called Mall. (You see where this is going already, I take it.) Meniscus' world is shaken up when a rogue male, whom Meniscus calls Starry Eyes, is brought into his bubble, an attempt to assassinate Starry Eyes with the plague that Meniscus is currently incubating. The whys and wherefores of the assassination attempt for the main mystery in this part of the book.
What makes this all work is Sullivan's crackling prose and flair for the B-grade dramatic; she knows exactly how to balance a cliffhanger to keep the reader pushing for just one more chapter. Despite the book's flaws (detailed above), I devoured it in a few sittings; Sullivan invents a near-future world of post-armageddon pop culture where an armageddon hasn't actually taken place, and it's fascinating to watch. Then, once you're hooked, she goes way over the top, and the fun is just hanging on to see how nuts this thing is going to get. Meanwhile, she's stealthily developing her characters, certainly more than I expected once I clued in to the B0grade nature of the book; by the end, it almost seemed as if Sullivan were crafting a parody of cyberpunk rather than the real thing. But not quite. And this is another aspect of the genius of Maul; having reflected on it as long as I have, I still can't quite tell. ****
Maul is everything I don't like about a book wrapped up in one package. So why is it that this thing works so very, very well? I don't have an answer to that, and I probably never will. And I'm not the only one that thought this, given some of the negative reviews I've read of the book. Sometimes, though-- it happens far more often in music-- you throw together all the stuff that makes a song pure crap and come out with absolute genius. Look at Better than Ezra's “A Lifetime” or Vertical Horizon's “Everything You Want”. It's rare that it happens in book form, but it does every once in a while. Maul is one of those books. It tosses together a vocabulary that makes next to no sense half the time (and weighs itself down with dialect all too often), uses a painful cliché as its turning point, is way too in love with its own postmodern flair, stops the action on a fairly regular basis to inject social commentary, and is desperately predictable. And yet, somehow, you put it all into the meatgrinder and what comes out the other end is delicious.
The book is divided into two parallel storylines. One deals with Sun, a Korean-American who, with two of her friends, is forced to go to the mall one Saturday morning (who's doing the forcing you find out later; too complicated to get into in a thousand words), where, thanks to one of her friends, she finds herself in a shootout with the city's toughest girl gang. The other, set in a world where a virus has wiped out most of the men, centers on Meniscus, a male clone who is a lab rat for designer genetic weaponry. He's autistic and noncommunicative, and Madeline, his handler, keeps him docile with a VR program called Mall. (You see where this is going already, I take it.) Meniscus' world is shaken up when a rogue male, whom Meniscus calls Starry Eyes, is brought into his bubble, an attempt to assassinate Starry Eyes with the plague that Meniscus is currently incubating. The whys and wherefores of the assassination attempt for the main mystery in this part of the book.
What makes this all work is Sullivan's crackling prose and flair for the B-grade dramatic; she knows exactly how to balance a cliffhanger to keep the reader pushing for just one more chapter. Despite the book's flaws (detailed above), I devoured it in a few sittings; Sullivan invents a near-future world of post-armageddon pop culture where an armageddon hasn't actually taken place, and it's fascinating to watch. Then, once you're hooked, she goes way over the top, and the fun is just hanging on to see how nuts this thing is going to get. Meanwhile, she's stealthily developing her characters, certainly more than I expected once I clued in to the B0grade nature of the book; by the end, it almost seemed as if Sullivan were crafting a parody of cyberpunk rather than the real thing. But not quite. And this is another aspect of the genius of Maul; having reflected on it as long as I have, I still can't quite tell. ****