Brasyl

Ian McDonald
Completed 12/14/2024, Reviewed 12/14/2024
2 stars

I have a mixed history with Ian McDonald.  I really liked his Luna: New Moon novella, but did not like another novella, Time Was.  This time, I did not like the book.  I felt it was overly complex and boring with way too many characters across three different timelines.  I felt it was a mess.  However, there are a lot of people who really like this book.  It won the 2007 British SF Award and was nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, and a host of other awards. I will say that the book has good prose and seems well researched, but the convoluted plots never grabbed me.

There are three story-/timelines.  The first is the book’s present, 2006 Brazil.  Marcelina is a reality show creator on a channel that produces the bottom of the barrel exploitive trash TV.  She’s trying to come up with the next big thing.  Her current idea is to find the soccer player who lost the 1950 world cup for Brazil and confront him about it.  He’s of course been out of the limelight for over 50 years.  In the meantime, she sees a doppelganger who uses her identity.  

In 2032, Edson is a cross-dressing bisexual opportunist who does his best to hide from the surveillance drones all over the cities.  He finds his former girlfriend is alive again and she appears to be a quantum computer hacker now.

Lastly in the mid-18th century, an Irish Jesuit is sent to the Brazilian rain forest to find a renegade priest, a la Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now.  He himself goes renegade and creates his own City of God.  There appear to be angels in the forest who can shoot out fire.

In each of these storylines, there is something out of kilter in the world and the main characters are affected by it.  There being a quantum computer hacker, angels, and doppelgangers, it’s pretty evident there is something crossing universes.  The trouble is, will the characters, and the reader ever figure out what’s going on. I felt like this book was so convoluted and confusing that I didn’t care when it was all finally revealed. I was bored silly by the situations the characters were in.  Even when there was action, I didn’t care.  And there were so many other characters in each timeline, I couldn’t keep track of who was who.  As the plots became more complex, I became more lost.  

I give this book two stars out of five.  I found next to nothing about it compelling.  There were moments when the rain forest timeline reminded me of Apocalypse Now and The Mission.  That kept me going through parts of that story.  But each chapter was about 25 pages long.  So just when I felt like I was getting into it, it jumped to the next timeline.  By the time I got back to it fifty or so pages later, I didn’t remember enough of it to keep the story alive in my head.  Not my cup of tea.