I have totally enjoyed others by this author but this ecipsed them.Very complicated story,that I wouldn't know where to place.SF ,fantasy with political overtones?To put it simply,kept me enthralled from beginning to end and one book I shall definately read again.As I am sure I missed some important facts as I sped through it.Take me back there.

I have been reading science fiction for about 40 years and the best I can recall, this is one of my least favorite. Although some may like Jon Courtenay Grimwood's style of writing (if this is representative, not having read any before) I found it very hard to follow and very disjointed. Although the central idea of the novel is a good one, the author, in my opinion, seems to wander away from the story line to provide meaningless details that tend to confuse the reader. I have made it about half way through the novel but I am finding it very hard to complete.

You've just tried to kill the US President and now you're under arrest while awaiting execution. But you're not worried because you know if the Chinese emperor in the far future wakes up in time, you'll be okay. What?

I don't know if that's the best way to describe the plot but then I'm not really sure what the best way to describe it is, which is . . . not promising? The back cover copy depicts a fairly interesting scenario where an assassin in the present day dreams about the aforementioned Chinese emperor who also appears to be dreaming him . . . and only reality can survive. And a handful of people are key to the outcome of all this, in ways perhaps they don't understand. Which puts me in the same boat as them.

Having read Grimwood's "Arabesk Trilogy" recently and, despite some criticisms (generally involving things being unnecessarily opaque at times), enjoyed them overall, I was looking forward to this one. Being a "Doctor Who" fan almost automatically makes me a fan of time travely stuff and while I'm not going to consult with a physicist to figure out how accurate the science, I don't mind when things are theoretically plausible.

Here, the science that's fine, its everything else that seems to be stretching things. While the book description foretells a trippy scenario with an ambiance both gritty and dreamlike that's not really what we get. What we do get is a plot split into three different sections . . . in the present day section we have the unnamed assassin in prison, not talking while everyone tries to figure out who he is and why he tried to kill the President, eventually dragging in a young psychiatrist. In the past we meet a young boy Moz living in Marrakesh and dealing with the criminal element as well as punk star Jake Razor. And in the future we have the Chinese emperor and all the futury stuff that goes with that.

Sound good? Good. Now imagine those three plots basically running parallel with very little hint that any of them are ever going to connect and you essentially have the book. Which would be okay if the plots themselves had anything to hold our interest but beyond fleeting flirtations with momentum and direction they just sort of meander along, like some kind of weird contest where one plot is waiting for the others to do something first before it moves and everyone gets stuck in a holding pattern no one wants to break. The past stuff in Marrakesh mostly features Moz interacting with various people and trying not to get killed . . . and that's kind of it. The present story with the captured assassin seems like it should be the place where most of the alleged "storying" is happening but it just sort of meanders to. The prisoner doesn't speak for a good chunk of the book and mostly does weird stuff that suggests he's unbalanced so you have a young psychiatrist having the literary equivalent of talking to a wall for pages on end. Until the book seems to get tired of her (despite her being listed as a main character) and brings in an older psychiatrist who suddenly makes progress (probably because she's dying, which automatically makes you smarter).

In the midst of that we have stabs at political maneuvering with the President and CIA and military all trying to decide what to do with the prisoner in terms of going through with his execution . . . which again, could be exciting but its like Grimwood took C-SPAN as his inspiration for a political thriller and then thought adding unbalanced silent people who don't pass any legislation but hint at breakthroughs in mathematics would be the right mix.

And then to break up the excitement of nothing happening we cut to the future scenes, which mostly verge on incoherent. His imagination is interesting but its so divorced from the rest of the book that its hard to figure out why its even there. The connections are as clear as the fine print at a lawyer convention and so it often seems that the main purpose of those chapters is to vamp until the plot is supposed to connect . . . something that feels even more apparent when a random character pops up most of the way through the book and seems to gain some importance even though its not clear why.

So it goes. Its not that long into the book that you start asking where he's going with all this and while his writing is good enough that you can give him a lot of rope and the benefit of the doubt, my patience in particular isn't going to last forever. The end result feels murky and opaque, a bunch of people floundering about in a dark room trying to describe the proverbial elephant via descriptions of colors as if the act of description is the most important thing and not explaining how an elephant even got into the room in the first place.

The ambition is there, the imagination is there, heck, even his prose is worthy. But without the connections being clear throughout we have to take it on faith that this is going to tie together somehow and end result appears to be . . . not really? Without a sense of the stakes involved its just three detached stories about people that aren't unlikeable but also aren't that compelling. Its possible that taking one or even two of these stories and filling them out might have made for a better book (and at times it feels like he had good ideas for the past and present threads and merely threw in the future stuff to spice things up) but having three just dilutes the pool too much and nobody winds up benefiting. With a more mysterious sense of atmosphere it might have gone down as a trippy bit of thought provoking fun but too often its like taking three random houses on my street that don't talk to each other and trying to write an all-encompassing story about them. I like my neighbors but often the only time our stories connect is by accident when we get each other's mail. Other than that, none of us belong in the same book and that's the case here too.

This is one of those novels that some would call brilliant and others would call pretentious. The previous (real) reviewers here are leaning to the latter criticism, and they do have a point because Grimwood's writing is often maddeningly obtuse and convoluted. While reading the book myself I swung wildly between the two camps, often marveling in the power of Grimwood's creativity and insight, only to have my enjoyment derailed again and again by deliberate vagueness and unnecessarily convoluted plot structures. Therefore my declaration is "almost brilliant" or "has potential." One has to wonder if Grimwood writes for readers or for other writers, because he's very high on craft but often lacking in basic readability. This novel is inherently fascinating, somehow connecting 1970s Morocco with a very unique Chinese planetary empire thousands of years in the future, binding them together via a weird present-day creative genius and an intriguing cosmic force that oversees the human condition and its history. The mood of the novel is dark and compelling, and you're likely to stay interested, but Grimwood's refusal to usefully outline his most fantastical ideas can be quite unsatisfying for the reader. There's something to be said for a writing style that remains purposefully obtuse in order to kick-start the reader's imagination, but that only works partially here. For fascinating modern science fiction with a cerebral twist, this book and the other works of Grimwood are certainly worth checking out, but they may only find total success with readers of a certain mindset. [~doomsdayer520~]

This book has three different layers that eventually merge together, however unlikely that seems. First, in the contemporary timeline there's the most-liked US president in the history and the strange Prisoner Zero who tries to assassinate him and after capture doesn't say a word. Then there's the Marrakech of 1970s with Moz and Malika and their messd-up lives. Third, there's the mystic Emperor watched by his 148 billion citizens, waiting for an assassin to arrive.

So yes, it's a strange book. All three storylines didn't work as well for me; I liked the Marrakech, but didn't like the Emperor too much. Then again, I read someone else commenting exactly the opposite, so your mileage may vary. Some of it will get boring before the end, but the final twists make enough sense to make it all worth reading, I suppose. However, there's quite a bit of - perhaps unnecessary - graphic violence, torture and sex; some might find that unpleasant.