{"id":2374,"date":"2012-12-19T09:24:54","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T14:24:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/?p=2374"},"modified":"2013-04-14T19:49:34","modified_gmt":"2013-04-14T23:49:34","slug":"book-review-great-north-road-by-peter-f-hamilton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/2012\/12\/book-review-great-north-road-by-peter-f-hamilton.html","title":{"rendered":"Book Review : Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton"},"content":{"rendered":"

[amazon_link id=”034552666X” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]\"Great[\/amazon_link]Title : Great North Road
\nAuthor : Peter F. Hamilton
\nGenre : Sci-fi, Mystery
\nPublisher : Tor
\nPages : 1089<\/strong>
\nSource : Netgalley\/ Publisher ARC
\nRating : 2.5\/5<\/p>\n

Before I requested this book on NetGalley I did a quick net lookup on Peter Hamilton \u2013 I hadn\u2019t read him before. General reviews were good. I\u2019m guessing then that I\u2019m in the minority because I don\u2019t quite get this book. It is a tome, and I didn\u2019t realize this since I normally don\u2019t pay attention to pages when I read \u2013 especially on the kindle, where all I see is the percentage read. With Great North Road, I would read and read and discover that I\u2019d read maybe only a couple of percent, so I looked up the book specifications. This one has close to 1100 pages!<\/p>\n

With a book of this length one would expect some rambling prose. And that\u2019s true here \u2013 it rambles on for about the 1st third \u2013 progress so glacial that I was tempted to just thrust it in my \u201cnot-finished\u201d pile. I persevered by skipping through arduous pedantic descriptions of police work.<\/p>\n

“Great North Road” is a mix of sci-fi and murder mystery. It is set in the future when the world has run out of natural energy sources and now depends on \u201cbioil\u201d produced by the algae-paddies of St.Libra, a planet accessible via a spatial gateway. The earth is now connected to many planets this way, courtesy the technological innovations of the Norths \u2013 a great family of clones. The original North makes 3 clones of himself (2Norths), and then they are further cloned (3Norths) etc. All North clones look and seem alike. When a North is found dead, floating in the Tune river, there is great pressure to find the killer.<\/p>\n

This task falls to Detective Sid Hurst, who plods along in the absence of clues. The North is unidentifiable; no North clone has been reported missing. Moreover death has occurred via what looks like to be a knife-fingered hand \u2013 5 slashes appear on the victim\u2019s chest and his heart has been pulverized and shredded. A similar crime has occurred 20 years back on St. Libra, with the murder of Bartram North and his household. The sole escapee, one Angela Tramelo, has been incarcerated for the past 20 years for a crime she denies committing.<\/p>\n

Angela believes that the killer was an alien “monster”. With Sid investigating leads on earth, the HDA (Human Defence Alliance) office decides to mount an expedition to St. Libra to find this \u201calien\u201d, with Tramelo\u2019s help. The expedition starts with energy and approval, but the rosy hue fades soon enough. Expedition members are being targeted and killed off one by one by an unseen nemesis, and the hostile terrain of St. Libra is making things very difficult . . .<\/p>\n

As I have said above this is a long book and could have been cut down to a compact half. I enjoyed Hamilton’s imaginative prose – especially talk of the “smart dust”, “intelligent meshes” and life-span extension, but I found that the pace was stilted with detailed descriptions of plodding police work. Characters are strong but many and it is hard to keep the large cast straight in your head. Angela is the most interesting character of the lot and her story unfolds in a series of “flashbacks” – a technique I quite liked. However I never quite got immersed enough to root for any protagonist. Maybe it is just me, or maybe large books with many characters, such as this one, are designed to be so; seen from afar and without any emotional involvement.<\/p>\n

Given that Tramelo is this book’s main character, it is a little disconcerting to see the degree to which she is sexualized. Also unexpected and off-putting in this sci-fi tome are the sex scenes\/orgies. Hamilton has his characters talk in quaint expressions : “aye”, “pet”, “crap on it” – so very not-space-agey. I’m going with a 2.5 rating on this book – for a mystery, Great North Road couldn’t quite develop the steam needed to leave the reader wanting more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[amazon_link id=”034552666X” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][\/amazon_link]Title : Great North Road Author : Peter F. Hamilton Genre : Sci-fi, Mystery Publisher : Tor Pages : 1089 Source : Netgalley\/ Publisher ARC Rating : 2.5\/5 Before I requested this book on NetGalley I did a quick net lookup on Peter Hamilton \u2013 I hadn\u2019t read him before. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"twitter_17000648_17000648":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[73,68,53,3,58,84,64,45,52,80,4,38,95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-5_star_rating","category-68","category-arc","category-books","category-crime","category-ebooks","category-imaginative","category-mystery","category-netgalley","category-new-books","category-review","category-sci-fi","category-tor"],"aioseo_notices":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"post-thumbnail":false,"sow-carousel-default":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"amodini","author_link":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/author\/admin"},"uagb_comment_info":1,"uagb_excerpt":"[amazon_link id=”034552666X” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][\/amazon_link]Title : Great North Road Author : Peter F. Hamilton Genre : Sci-fi, Mystery Publisher : Tor Pages : 1089 Source : Netgalley\/ Publisher ARC Rating : 2.5\/5 Before I requested this book on NetGalley I did a quick net lookup on Peter Hamilton \u2013 I hadn\u2019t read him before.…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2374"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2546,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374\/revisions\/2546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}