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The Hair-Carpet Weavers Q2: Structure and effects on Characters and Setting
What did you think of the structure of this book? The back cover endorsements on my Penguin Classics SF edition both call it a novel. What did you think? How did you feel about the flow of the story?
I think any question about the characters and setting ties right into the structure. Obviously these were both lightly drawn. Did you get on with the characters and setting? Any thoughts on the depth and breadth of these elements?
Comments
Personally I wouldn't call it a novel, though I guess it's in part a matter of semantics. It's certainly not a fixup book, as the individual scenes are too short and fragmentary to make much sense on their own. It feels more like a kind of kaleidoscope view on fragments of a world, but with the progression on top of that of steadily finding out the reason for the whole scheme to exist in the first place. Whatever one calls it, it worked for me, though I suspect that a lot of people might try to copy the style and end up with something that was just chaotic!
As you say, both characters and settings were thin, but typically used as the linking thread between one story and the next, so they had to have enough substance to achieve this. To that end they worked fine.
I'm not sure if worrying about definitions of "novel" is worthwhile. This was a single, coherent story, just one told in fragments that the reader had to assemble.
It took me a while to work out what Eschbach was doing with the structure, showing us brief glimpses of the world(s). Yes, the characters were thin, but they were vehicles to show aspects of the setting. Indeed, the very thinness of the characters fed into the theme: across the scope of time, space, and duty in the book, individuals barely matter.
Yeah I'm with @NeilNjae Maybe it's a novel and maybe it is not - I would suspect there are some specific scholarly types that could make a good argument one way or the other. The only tenuously connected stories didn't cause an issue for me as the connections were tight enough that I was able to connect the dots as I went along. The one chapter that felt a little out of place was the one with Ludkamon where they ended up winning the competition only to become a slave to the computer. I couldn't quite figure out how it fit in, though it was still an interesting chapter.
It can be difficult to really connect with characters when we only run into them for such short periods of time, so I wouldn't classify that apspect as one of the stronger parts of the book.
I think that was another example of the imperial cult making people want to do self-destructive things. It's not enough to control people, they have to want to be controlled.