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A review by lucyismyname
The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier
2.0
I tend to avoid science fiction because usually the ideas come at the expense of character development (especially of women) and good writing. However, a science fiction book where the technological or fantasy elements are used to drive character development or showcase complex psychological or sociologically realities can be truly brilliant (I’m thinking Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, a handful of Margaret Atwood books, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, among others).
So I was delighted to see a science-fiction book that won a literary award and from an established writer making his debut into science fiction. Plus, quite frankly, the idea is cool: during a dramatic storm, a plane and all its passengers are replicated. One plane lands on time and the other lands 4 months later, with both sets of passengers unaware of what occurred.
The book was, as promised, a ‘page turner’, but it failed on both the literary and science fiction fronts. It covered too many characters to provide enough room to effectively show how any one person would deal with such a situation. The characters themselves were narrowly painted and hollow. Two men were infatuated with women decades their junior for no reason except for the obvious, and their pursuit of them led to some pretty uncompelling reading and trite dialogue – some of this may have been satire but there was no insight nor any complexity given to the objects of their obsession.
In terms of how the book performed within its own genre, it took a fairly ingenious idea but then handled the science fiction elements unskillfully. The writing of the military and governmental handling of the incident felt like it was taken from various early-mid 90s disaster movies (the novel format left less room for any charm to be found amongst the cringe). It was both boring and detracted from what should have been the book’s only real focus: how its characters reacted to and navigated this odd situation they were thrust into.
So I was delighted to see a science-fiction book that won a literary award and from an established writer making his debut into science fiction. Plus, quite frankly, the idea is cool: during a dramatic storm, a plane and all its passengers are replicated. One plane lands on time and the other lands 4 months later, with both sets of passengers unaware of what occurred.
The book was, as promised, a ‘page turner’, but it failed on both the literary and science fiction fronts. It covered too many characters to provide enough room to effectively show how any one person would deal with such a situation. The characters themselves were narrowly painted and hollow. Two men were infatuated with women decades their junior for no reason except for the obvious, and their pursuit of them led to some pretty uncompelling reading and trite dialogue – some of this may have been satire but there was no insight nor any complexity given to the objects of their obsession.
In terms of how the book performed within its own genre, it took a fairly ingenious idea but then handled the science fiction elements unskillfully. The writing of the military and governmental handling of the incident felt like it was taken from various early-mid 90s disaster movies (the novel format left less room for any charm to be found amongst the cringe). It was both boring and detracted from what should have been the book’s only real focus: how its characters reacted to and navigated this odd situation they were thrust into.