Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer is an ambitious start to a four book speculative fiction epic. It describes a world with fast cheap travel, a taboo against the expression of gender and religion and the abolishment of national borders and asks how society would change as a result. The narrator Mycroft Canner fills the book with details about the three levels of law (Black, Grey, and White), the top five Hives (borderless nations) and the ministry that holds it all together. With so much to think about, my book club had a grand old time talking about the implications of each idea and what it would mean to live in such a world. It was a good conversation.
Too bad I hated the book.
The narrator and main character, Mycroft Canner, is a former serial killer and troubleshooter for the world’s elite and he’s the primary reason why I hated the book. Long before the book club selected Too Like the Lightning, I actually downloaded a sample since I found the title so interesting. It opened with the following:
You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described.
He was right. I barely tolerate 19th century style writing from the likes of Charles Dickens; reading that style from a present day book set in the distant future was too much for me so I moved on, not bothering to read past the 10 page sample. When I read it for book club, I found that my initial impression was correct; Mycroft Canner is very fond of odd turns of phrases, its complicated world, and, most annoyingly, Voltaire, whose name I only barely remembered. Looking him up in Wikipedia afterwards, I read that he’s credited with the development of free speech and was fond of criticizing the Catholic church, which explains why religion is banned. While Mycroft tries to sell me on the man and his work, it felt like I was reading the work of a poser. Palmer’s writing is impressive; she renders Mycroft Canner very well.
If the pseudo-archaic style were it, I’d would been only annoyed with the story, but the writing adds further complications. On occasion, Palmer changes points of view as Mycroft gets other people to write for him, guesses what people were doing out of his sight, or, the worst yet, argues with an invisible reader over word choice. That last does a stellar job of turning me off the work even when I’ve finally settled in. It’s jarring to be in the middle of a scene and then end up reading a long passage about whether or not to call a character a witch. While the arguments do a good job of characterizing Mycroft as defensive and high minded, it breaks my flow in a way that feels somewhat indulgent.
In the first paragraph, I mentioned that expressions of gender were taboo in the world of Too Like the Lightning. This fact frustrates Mycroft who decides (using the excuse of his archaic style) to assign genders to characters based on how masculine or feminine he feels they are in that moment, often switching pronouns for certain characters. This tendency is the most controversial part of the book. As a CIS gendered man, I’ve only occasionally had the experience of someone guessing that I was female instead of male, but only based on reading my name, which is ambiguously gendered to most Americans, and never in person. For trans people though, it’s a different story. Imagine reading a whole book where a man spends the whole book assigning gender to people regardless of what they feel or think while living in a world where that exact thing happens to your face. It’s appalling. The best explanation that I’ve heard is that Mycroft’s habits are derived from how he was raised. That’s a spoiler though, so I won’t go into detail here.
Too Like the Lightning is filled with ideas. In addition to what I mentioned already, there’s a child with the ability to bring toys to life, a group of people who have had their senses trained from birth to do math, and an esoteric mystery involving a list of names. With the world filled to the brim, the plot actually doesn’t go anywhere for large sections of the book. The fact that this is only the first half of a book that was split into too is imminently clear when the ending arrives and nothing has been resolved. If you like those idea, enjoy the writing and/or just want to see where it all goes, I think you’ll have a good time with the book. The work is ambitious and Palmer should be commended for bringing all of those idea together in a coherent way. I just can’t read anymore of Mycroft’s thoughts.
Admaeus Speaks 