A journey into style over substance.
And a journey into frustration. But this isn't new for Marisha Pessl...
Read her Special Topics in Calamity Physics; liked the ideas and mood, liked the characters, completely unsatisfied in the ending after the build.
Read her Night Film, very much liked the ideas and mood! Liked the characters. Unsatisfied in the ending after the build.
Care to guess how I felt about Darkly?
You're right, but this time not so crazy about the ideas, the characters, and forget the build and that ending.
So, let's take a wander where the problem lies -
The plot of Darkly - an eccentric, secretive genius becomes a legend through unique creative output, vanishes (maybe dies) mysteriously, now being investigated with surprising/shocking revelations - is essentially just a re-skin of Night Film. Except with board games instead of horror films. Where these plot points worked for the previous novel, referencing and paying homage to real movies and real cult film-makers, it fails completely here.
Quick aside: I am a looong-time, hardcore board and role-play gamer; I've ridden the rise and fall crazes of Fantasy Flight and Dungeons & Dragons, which are probably the closest real-world approximations to the Darkly games. Heavy gamers come to look at the world, and react to things, in a certain way. If you are such a player, you know what I mean. Keep this in mind...
What Pessl sets up in Darkly is completely unbelievable right from the start, and only becomes more so as the story progresses. Sure, a writer is a god and can do whatever they want in their literary world, but for the reader if verisimilitude and suspension of disbelief fail, the writer has nothing. Shortcuts, coincidence, magical thinking, and outright cheats are how you lose the writing game - particularly if you are trying to build a mystery and sustain a slowburn of tension and atmosphere.
I'm going to machinegun these negatives rapidly and get them out of the way:
Plot - unbelievable, from premise to settings to chain of events. There is no reality here at all. It's all delirium and dream-logic, which would be fine for fantasy or a parable, but this is meant to be realistic genre fiction. From experience, games like the Darklys (which have existed to much lesser extents-see Fantasy Flight games) would be fringe/niche items, get no distribution beyond specialty stores, and die on the shelf.
Characters - thinly-thinly drawn. "Pawns" is the word, as that's what they all are. Nobody speaks or acts like a real person, and definitely not at all like seasoned gamers. They seem to exist only to give some slight contrast to MC Dia. We have no reason to care what they do or to care what happens to them (this gang of youths is even less substantial than the gang in her Neverworld Wake).
Pacing - dragging, repetitive, careless and lazy. Did anyone edit this book? Dia climbs a high chain-link fence a couple times but everyone else just drifts through it... The gang explores abandoned factories and derelict houses without power several times well after midnight, but darkness never seems to be a problem and small details are easy for them (mostly Dia) to spot in an instant... Dia is shoved by a running boy in a railroad tunnel (in the dark) and reflects that he was hiding behind a church pew(?) and then recognizes him instantly later on (after only having had a fleeting glimpse of him from behind in that tunnel)... In a flashback revelation, we learn that someone tied themselves to the outside of a boat(!) and managed an eight-hour voyage to and back through choppy seas... Poe is badly cutup by a factory machine (described as bleeding quite a lot) and Mouse is struck by a stone raven fallen from a rooftop (even a "glancing" blow to his shoulder would cause serious injury) but both are fine a page or two later... Dia flees the factory (with the high chain-link fence) and runs across the island and wakes up four sleeping people and gets them to follow her back across the island (on foot) to the factory (with the high chain-link fence) in the time it takes two other people to descend a flight of stairs in the factory... I'll stop here, but you see now what I mean about dream-logic, and once we've surrendered to that, why care at all about anything?
The ending (no spoilers) -Pessl enjoys including artefacts in her books as clues and teases, and this ergodic approach did work well in Night Film, but here just tips the gameboard - too much is telegraphed and when the "aha" moments come in the narrative, they're flat and deflated. Skip the documents and letters and things if you can; go back and look at them when you've finished the book. Personally, although I stuck through to the very end, I'd really stopped caring about anything and the cliché and coincidence stack had grown so high all I could think was "ooof course...". Very audible eye roll.
Now, given all of the above, bear this in mind - I'm not young; I am not Delacorte Press's intended demographic for this book. This shouldn't mean anything as far as the quality of the work, but for someone who is young, to whom all the ideas and techniques in this book are new, Darkly may be a very different experience. It's posable that technical issues will mean less to you than cool concepts.
Have you read this book? Get it here in the Library! Do you agree with the review above, or disagree? Share your thoughts!
