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alaterdate) wrote2020-05-02 07:00 am
The Terror
The Terror by Dan Simmons was recommended to me by a friend. She read it in September of 2018 and one day over dinner in late 2019 we each chose one book we'd like the other to read (technically was supposed to be our very next read, but that didn't happen as we'd both been struggling to read as much as we'd like). Well, I finally read it!
Content Warning for: racism, sexism, paedophilia and homophobia (they are present in the book and in my review I mention them briefly).
And I didn't like it. Turns out she only gave it one more star than I did though. I think she wanted me to read it just so we could discuss it. I don't know why else she subjected me to this torture she barely liked herself 😂
The Terror is around 800 pages long and I was tired of it around page 300. But I pulled through in the end. It's partly advertised as a supernatural thriller and there is an element of that, but the majority of the book is simply focused on the crews of HMS Erebus and Terror trying to survive another winter in the arctic. The entire endeavor is incredibly detailed, making the historical fiction side of the story neat to an extent. Unfortunately, this "accuracy" bogs down everything else about the book. From the inclusion of racism, sexism, paedophilia and homophobia to the way it absolutely kills the pacing. Pretty much everyone is racist to the native people they encounter, the prominent woman in the book is constantly degraded verbally and she's only fifteen years old but the men are constantly talking about her sexually, and the character who ends up the main villain is gay (which is ok, but what is not okay is the manner in which he is portrayed after the audience finds out his sexual orientation). None of the characters are terribly great either and I can hardly remember their names.
I think this book had a bit of an identity crisis and shoehorned the supernatural bits in there to hardly any effect. It was also WAY too long. There were a lot of unnecessary flashbacks into the lives of characters I didn't even care about. Then the supernatural bit dropped off only to come back in a n extremely boring and confusing and culturally appropriating way. (As the supernatural creature is part of "Eskimeaux" culture in the book.
There were a couple of interesting chapters and some good prose peppered in here and there, but overall the story was extremely weak due to lack of focus.
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I'm surprised this book is so widely touted. I guess the author is popular, but yeesh. I really don't see of the point of much of this book. I don't know why he felt the need to include any of the supernatural elements either when they take up 10% of the 800+ pages and are irrelevant until he goes deus ex machina with it by making the white ship captain connected to the indigenous folklore 😬 To me the entire work was gross at worst and boring at best.
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