tl;dr

My first “Did Not Finish” for the year.

opening remarks

The Sky Is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith not only has a fantastic neon cover, but the novel has been compared to the work of David Foster Wallace.  I assume this means it’s a very long book about French terrorists, the majesty of tennis, the cult of Alcoholics Anonymous and is set in a near future where every year is branded by a multi-national.  Yes, I’m showing off that I’ve read Infinite Jest because that’s what people who’ve read Infinite Jest do.

knee-jerk observations

There’s a footnote on the first page which refers to a psychotropic moss.  Maybe the DFW comparison isn’t just hype, or possibly I should read more than one page.

The introduction of dragons is not a typical DFW move (ok… ok… I’ll stop):

Duncan Ripple (the girls just call him the Dunk) is an 18-year old spoiled brat in a world where two dragons wheel across the sky and you’re either grossly rich or very poor.

Duncan has spent most of his life making a reality TV show on the ‘toobs’ watched mostly by the destitute who live in the Sprawl.  Now that he’s 18 Dunk’s parents have shut down his show and organised an arranged marriage with Swan Dahlberg, also rich, also spoilt.  Before this union can be sanctified (or contracts can be signed) Duncan crash lands his flying car (it was attacked by one of the dragons) on an island of garbage.  It’s here he meets 18-year-old Abby who was brought to the Island as a child by the Lady.  The Lady taught her young charge that Abby was the last human on the planet now that the world had been taken over by People Machines.  Abby is therefore quite elated to discover that Duncan is human.

Dunk, injured as he is, can only think of his penis:

Elsewhere, in Torchtown – a penal colony that’s become the primary target for the dragons, hence the name – we are introduced to Sharkey.  He’s quite the evil bastard:

This is Duncan’s mother Katya:

Duncan’s bride to be, Swanny Dahlberg, has this little issue where she keeps growing teeth necessitating the presence of a full-time dentist to pull the buggers out.  Meanwhile, Duncan and Abby have been saved by Duncan’s eccentric Uncle Osmond.  As I’ve come to expect, Dunk continues to think only about his cock.

I’m a quarter of the way through the novel, and while it is very readable I would kill for a single likeable character.  Abby comes the closest but only because she’s a blank slate, lacking in pretension or self-awareness.  Everyone else is rude, obnoxious or obsessed with money and sex.  I know it’s deliberate but it ain’t half tiresome.

The two soon-to-be-weds (Dunk and Swanny) take a stroll after dinner.  I’m not sure which one I dislike more (as a by the by Dunk’s dog Hooligan shits where he pleases):

Swanny and Duncan are now married.  Duncan, because he’s a gentleman, hopes to get the sexy-juices flowing by referring to his 400 hours of porn (only 400 hours… what sort of hell is this?!).  He reads out some titles.  I admit I laughed at mention of The Aristocrats:

It’s taken far too long, nearly half the novel, for the plot to step into gear.  Aside from Dunk crashing into the garbage island – which is resolved relatively quickly – most of the story has centred around establishing the gilded-cage nature of the society.  The Ripples are obscenely wealthy, but they’re trapped by that wealth; and the marriage between Duncan and Swanny, which takes forever to happen, is weighed down by the fact that Duncan and Swanny are – and this is an understatement – two very irritating people.  There’s some vague mystery about Abby, where she comes from and her ability to read the thoughts of animals, which I assume will be a focus of the second part of the novel, but really the most exciting thing to happen is having Duncan, Swanny and Abby escape to the broken, scorched, poverty-ridden part of the city after the Ripple mansion is attacked by looters and scavengers.  Having these awful people out of their air-conditioned, pampered environment is, at least, a change, even if it all feels very familiar.

Look, it’s possible something extraordinary and revelatory happens in the last third of The Sky Is Yours, but I don’t care to know.  The introduction of two Dickensian urchins was the straw that broke my reading back:

The Gist Of It

Having read more than half of The Sky Is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith I have thrown in the towel.  Yes, I was drawn to the novel by the ecstatic comparisons to Infinite Jest, but the fact that it’s nothing like IJ isn’t why I’ve stopped reading.  It’s because I never felt I was in on the joke.

The Sky Is Yours has a satirical tone, it’s having fun at the expense of the mega-rich, the 0.01%.  Their bizarre, indulgent, absorbed attitudes are meant to be a source of black humour, an echo to the decline of Rome, Nero playing the fiddle etc.  But there’s no meat to the bones, none of the jokes or gags provide any great insight into the characters or the world.  To be fair, there are moments, when Smith refers to the dragons and describes the burnt remains of the city, that the novel takes on a wistful tone, where we get the full impact of a society in decline, rotten to the core.  But then Duncan says something sexist or just plain stupid and the moment is lost.

Talking about Duncan and Swanny, they are unlikeable.  That shouldn’t be a reason to stop reading a novel.  I’ve read stories where the characters were utter pricks and still finished the book because, and this is the crucial bit, they were interesting.  Aside from Swanny having far too many teeth, there is nothing remotely compelling about these two people.  Maybe they develop in the last third, maybe they grow out of their throwback attitudes – with Duncan it’s his sexism with Swanny it’s her sense of entitlement and wish fulfilment – but to spend 80,000 words with these two people, almost predicting what they were going to say next because they lacked depth, was painful.  Yes, there’s Abby, an enigmatic blank slate who will assuredly play a pivotal role in the book’s denouement, but she isn’t enough of a mystery to sustain interest.

A couple of the positive reviews I’ve seen describe this as a genre-bending novel.  I suppose it’s because it features dragons.  But then I think of Michael Swanwick’s extraordinary work The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (also dragons) with its chaotic, vulgar world, written almost two decades ago and I wonder whether these phrases have lost their meaning.  I know I sound old and cranky, but seriously genre-bending has to mean more than just adding dragons to an SF setting.

If there’s one positive out of this experience it’s that I have a hankering to re-read Infinite Jest.

P.S. I’m not going to re-read Infinite Jest.  Have you seen how fucking long that book is?!

P.P.S. Chandler Klang Smith writes about unlikeable characters here.  It’s a smart piece; it’s just a shame that what she argues – especially in regard to the development of Duncan Ripple – in my humble, isn’t reflected in the novel.