Talented writer. He is marvelous at describing a scene or setting---you can just about smell it. Also the way he glides thru dialogue without quotation marks & the he said/she said. There's a bit of a cool remove which helps and hurts the work. The detachment helps the reader see the panorama of dystopia, but because it feels and seems to happen like a mirage in front of you, the narrative does not sweep you away. There gets to be a feeling of uninvolved sameness. At one point I checked the length of the novel and was relieved the work of reading it would end at @ 300 pages. But what a scene-setter and sentence-smith.

Loved the novel, despite its display of overly much cruelty. But I didn't understand why in the final paragraphs he so shamelessly fished for contemporary relevance (the sea....). And: the setting in Ireland with its super-clear historical antagonism is a strange placement which I couldn't grasp, especially after having read The Milkman. ....it's a bit of an ambivalent reading pleasure.