Gaiman, Neil and Michael Reaves - Interworld

[chomiji]

Sometimes I read a book, and it feels as though the author has decided to write in the style of some other author. For example, Thursday's Children, which tells the story of sister-brother ballet students Crystal and Doone Penny, reads as though author Rumer Godden had decided to write a la Noel Streatfield, author of Ballet Shoes and other children's classics about children in the performing arts. Similarly, Interworld reads as though Gaiman and Reaves had decided to write a Diana Wynne Jones science fiction/fantasy novel, somewhat in the mold of both The Homeward Bounders and Deep Secret, with perhaps a bit of A Tale of Time City thrown in. It's not as good a book as those first two, and isn't really as good as Gaiman's own Coraline, either, but it's a pleasant enough read. However, it has some strange similarities to other things I've read.

The hero and first-person narrator of Interworld is the decidedly unheroic young Joey Harker of Greenville, who describes himself as "the kid who could get lost going to the corner mailbox." When an eccentric Social Studies teacher sends Joey and his fellow students out on an exercise in which small teams are dropped off at random locations around town and told to find their way to various checkpoints - without the use of maps - Joey figures his goose is cooked. And because his team includes the girl he fancies, he imagines he's going to be humiliated, as well. So it's not too surprising that he is soon telling the object of his affections to wait a moment while he checks out the next turning, and running ahead .... through a bank of mist. On the other side is a McDonald's - with a green tartan arch. No, Joey isn't in Greenville anymore. Soon the kid who could get lost in his own house is skipping across dimensions from world to world. It turns out that Joey is a Walker, and as such, he's in danger from representatives of two opposing evil forces, representing the extremes of magic and technology, who exploit Walkers for their ability to travel from world to world. But the Walkers from the various worlds have banded together to fight the HEX and the Binary forces, and Joey soon finds himself training for exotic missions with ... multiple versions of himself.

Interworld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves - review

 

The basic setup for the universe of the book reads like a slightly different twist on the Multiverse in Jones' Deep Secret (and its sequel, The Merlin Conspiracy). But there is no apocalyptic battle between Good and Evil going on in Jones' Multiverse: worlds at one end are technological, worlds at the other are magical, and although those who walk the worlds seem to have a bias toward magic, villains and saints can both be found in either region, and anywhere inbetween. But in Interworld, if you're a Walker, you'd better join your fellow Walkers and train to fight the HEX and the Binary, because both groups hunt Walkers down and use them in unpleasant ways to power transportation between the worlds - a setup that has more than a little in common with the fate of the wizards who fall into the hands of the world-conquering Gardier in Martha Wells' excellent and under-rated "Fall of Ile-Rien" trilogy!

Joey Harker's situation also has something in common with that of Jamie Hamilton, protagonist of The Homeward Bounders, whose curiosity leads him to become a Homeward Bounder, fated to skip from world to world whenever a game move is finished by the powerful Them who use the worlds as their game boards. Both must leave their families and everything else behind, but Joey ends up with a band of brothers (and sisters), even though he's persona non grata when he first arrives (Jay, the Walker who saved him, was very popular - and he dies saving Joey), whereas Jamie rarely encounters other Homeward Bounders. And Joey is being trained in how to deal with his situation, whereas Jamie has to discover almost everything by himself. There's also the plain fact that Joey Harker is Special - he seems to be the Fated Savior, or something. As soon as he is detected by the other Walkers (and the bad guys), they know he's one of the most powerful Walkers there ever was. Jamie, by contrast, is just a scruffy working class kid who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He becomes something much, much more in the course of the story - partially by fate, but also by his own grit.

I find it a little weird, in fact, that Joey's and Jamie's initials are the same. And they're both called by childish nicknames: as young teens, they could have been Joe and Jim, not Joey and Jamie. I maybe be making something out of nothing - but Gaiman is a big Diana Wynne Jones fan, so this may be deliberate, an intentional homage.

I don't mean to pick on the book. I like Gaiman as an author, and from his blog, I've come to feel that he's a really fine human being. But I find myself becoming irritated, as I often do, with the way that many excellent authors are either left in niche markets - like Jones - or almost completely ignored - like Wells. This is not Gaiman's finest work (and I feel that part of the issue is his collaboration with Reaves - in this book,I miss the distinctive Gaimanesque whimsy that marks most of his writing) but chances are it will get more positive attention than anything by Jones (despite her recent fame as the original author of Howl's Moving Castle) or Wells. In fact, it has already been optioned by Dreamworks. Sometimes life just isn't fair, and I'm still not reconciled to the fact.

Comments

[dana1witch.livejournal.com]

I'll have to come back and read your comments after I had a chance to read it myself. I've looked in my local bookstores as soon as it was out and nothing. I'll have to settle for Amazon.