The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’m a Pratchett fan, like most of the people who’ve read The Long Earth. Not so much that I’ve scoured the world for every scrap of his writing, but enough that if I see something with his name on it, I’ll pick it up. Not so much with Baxter. I wound up with a free copy of one his books on my e-reader, and I just couldn’t get into it. And since free means easy come easy go, I didn’t make it past page 10.
But I figured I’d give The Long Earth. After all, even though I can’t seem to get into Neil Gaiman either, I like what Pratchett and Gaiman did with their collaboration. So for this novel I guess everything was resting on Pratchett. And I guess it wasn’t enough.
Either that or there was some horribly deep metaphor here that I just never picked up on. I liked the concept of the ‘Long Earth’, and even liked the way the “technology” was discovered… but after that, all everything else was just spread too thin. Lobsang’s airship was too convenient. The natural steppers were just too convenient. The Gap, and the very Buddha-like meta-mind was too convenient. The terrible thing that happens to Madison at the end was really very too convenient. I was unmoved by any of it. I wasn’t sure what the plot was all about, if there was one at all. None of the characters resonated for me.
I could tell where Pratchett’s hand was writing the words, his light but skillful way with language, like Bach playing around on a clavichord. So it wasn’t all bad. But it wasn’t immersive enough. Pratchett’s characters (and yes I’m thinking of Discworld here) are usually so dynamic and interesting. But in The Long Earth: flat.
It’s tempting to “blame” Baxter for the things I didn’t like, but that’s too easy. Instead, I’m going to blame the collaborative process. Yes, I said I’d liked Good Omens, so it’s not that the collaborative process is guaranteed to fail. But this time, I think there was more cancelling out than augmentation.