An audio book.
In a run down London where the lucky live in the Ark while the rest live in squalour amongst vagrants and killer diseases, sleeping in pods, Marquis manages to pass the tests, leaving his mother Willow in order to travel over The Blim (wasteland) to the Ark. He becomes a journalist.
4 hours in I wasn't hooked and there are many hours to go. Time to stop? It would be a shame, because I like (sometimes admire) his short stories. It's as if lots of the text is there to dilute the info-dumping. "He lifted his arms upwards" - but where else would he lift them? The episode where he meets Wallace might work onscreen but for me it fails as text. So goodbye.
Other reviews
- Adam Roberts (Newland is certainly not the only contemporary writer trying to reproduce the immediacy and kinetic hustle of visual drama; but TV and novels tell stories in quite different ways, and sometimes that difference jars. ... Newland gives his dystopia an extra spin by making it an alternate history. In this world European interactions with Africa, stretching back to Ancient Egypt, were treated as opportunities to learn and mingle, not to exploit and enslave. Where the novel really comes into its own is the final quarter, when various diverging timelines are gathered into a multiverse bouquet. It almost makes up for the disbelief I couldn’t quite suspend in the earlier stages. Conceivably these latter sections work best because here Newland is back in the “real” world, and that’s where he is best fitted as a writer. But if A River Called Time left me with some reservations, no one can doubt the sheer energy and verve of Newland’s vision.)
- goodreads
- Kirkus reviews
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