Polostan

I remember going out to see The Empire Strikes Back when it opened in London in 1980, and getting to the end – with Han Solo looking like a half-melted bar of chocolate and being carried off by the bad guys – and then sitting in the cinema waiting for the commercials to be over so the story could continue. Because TESB didn’t have an ending; it just stopped. The only thing missing before the lights came up were the words, To Be Continued. Like an episode of TV.

That’s a little the way I feel about Neal Stephenson’s latest: It’s as readable as all his best books, an interesting setting – the USA and Russia in the 1930s – and a compelling, non-cliched protagonist. But at page 300, it just stops. 

I didn’t feel as disappointed – and cheated – as I felt when I go to the ‘end’ of TESB. Probably because it says up front that this is the first book in a trilogy. The thing is, though, it doesn’t read like the first ‘book’ of a trilogy, with a self-contained narrative that concludes but is also open to expansion in further volumes. 

What it feels like is the first third of one long book. As though the publisher got bored typesetting it all and decided to put out the first 300 pages and then come back to the remaining 600 – if NS’s other massive tomes are anything to go by - when they felt like it.

I liked Polostan. I like Neal Stephenson’s novels. But I’ll probably like it a whole lot more when I get to read the rest of it.