Little Brother

For anyone coming here for the first time, I said last week that I loved Cory Doctorow's Little Brother - and that's where I'm starting this lengthy booktalk, as it bears repeating. Also I'm going to say some things about it which aren't so positive, and I want the love on record. As this is an intensely message-driven book, I'm also going to do a brief disclosure of my feelings on the political/ideological issues raised in it. I'll start by saying that I'm a US citizen as well as an Irish one, and that I have lived in both countries for very roughly equal amounts of time. If I wander into areas which are crititical of some matters US-ian, I do so as that citizen, who will be voting in November - voting Democrat, not incidentally, (though if there were a party more liberal than the Democrats, I'd definitely be there and happier). While living in the States, I was involved in various political - including Christian political - groups, such as the Freeze, protests over US policy in Central America, Bread for the World, and have had friends involved in the more radical Christian groups like the Ploughshares. If you dislike this type of political belief, you'll probably have little interest in the book OR this post, and that's fine.

Why bother boring people with this? Because, as I said, this is a book which I loved for its message and for the information in it - had there been no message or had it been one I thought trivial or misguided, I very much doubt I'd have had much time for the book. I also think the techno-geekery was fascinating, and delivered better here than it was in Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, much as I liked that.

So, all that out of the way, a very brief over-view of the book, for those who might not have heard anything about it. Little Brother is set in the very near future, in San Francisco. (At least, I read it as the near future, and there was nothing to indicate it was any kind of alternate reality instead - with one possible exception, which I'll talk about later.) Its 17-year-old narrator, Marcus, is picked up in a massive crack-down by the Department of Homeland Security when there's a serious terrorist attack on the city. He and three friends are taken to a secret prison on a small island nearby where they're held without charge, without representation, and without even being allowed to notify their families that they're alive. After his release, he's watched, bugged and followed, more than everyone in the city is watched, but is able to fight back and enable others to fight the repressive and unjust DHS, finding himself most unexpectedly, the leader of a group of hackers, gamers, and geeks of various sorts.

emmaco said she'd wondered from what she heard whether the message over-powered the story, and that made me sit down and think - again - about that. I realised then that the parts of the book I liked most were when the narrative took however many pages it took and just explained the technical stuff, and my least favourite part of the book was Marcus's romantic relationship, which I found over-balanced the message. Okay, not quite. Also this is an entirely personal reaction, and for whatever reason, I really disliked Ange, and found her boring too. That's no literary opinion, though I doubt if anyone would make a claim for the book's greatness on aesthetic grounds alone. (Out of sheer curiousity, I'd love to know if there are others who felt the same way about the relationship, and as a secondary question, whether there's any male-female split over it.)

I have three less personal criticisms to make of the book, which I'll list and then go on about the first behind a cut. One is a narrative aside about the UK, which has no real place in the story, but seems to me to be worse than just pointless. The second is the whole 'Don't trust anyone over 25' thing, (started by Ange, I might add), which makes little sense in the context and seemed to me to be thrown in to enable the Good Social Studies teacher to have a free-and-open debate about civil liberties and personal freedom (after giving an impromptu lecture about the 60s), which of course has Consequences. And that in turn allows the introduction of yet another Mouthpiece of the Repressive Right - as obnoxious as any of them. That's the third criticism: I had no problem with most of the bad guys being unshaded Bad Guys, and think Marcus's dad's carefully-explained reaction to thinking Marcus is dead is extremely well done. But I do think the book would have benefitted from a bit more editing to get some of the speeches on both sides a little more realistic and a little less mouth-piecey. And the one teen who's a Bad Guy is so stereotypically so it's a little painful - wet face and all. (It's a good thing for Marcus he's clueless too, but still...)

( Cut for the odd British quote and discussion thereof )

Despite the criticisms, I still hope a lot of people read it, as I think a lot of people will enjoy it, or find it's got something that's thought-provoking or gripping or at very least, informative. And Cory Doctorow is just the definition of cool.