The Dervish House, Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
Premise: "It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone it seems is after a piece of Turkey. But the shock waves from this random act of twenty-first-century pandemic terrorism will ripple further and resonate louder than just Enginsoy Square.
Welcome to the world of The Dervish House—the great, ancient, paradoxical city of Istanbul, divided like a human brain, in the great, ancient, equally paradoxical nation of Turkey. The year is 2027 and Turkey is about to celebrate the fifth anniversary of its accession to the European Union, a Europe that now runs from the Arran Islands to Ararat. Population pushing one hundred million, Istanbul swollen to fifteen million, Turkey is the largest, most populous, and most diverse nation in the EU, but also one of the poorest and most socially divided. It's a boom economy, the sweatshop of Europe, the bazaar of central Asia, the key to the immense gas wealth of Russia and central Asia.
The Dervish House is seven days, six characters, three interconnected story strands, one central common core—the eponymous dervish house, a character in itself—that pins all these players together in a weave of intrigue, conflict, drama, and a ticking clock of a thriller." - from the Pyr website.
Steph's Comments: Doesn't the publisher's description sound promising? Indeed, McDonald does have a germ of a good sci-fi idea here: that sophisticated nano-tech may eventually fall into the hands of international terrorists who will attempt to use it to achieve their own goals. Unfortunately, said plot is completely drowned out by hundreds of pages of really dense, self-indulgent description regarding characters whose connections to the main story are pretty tenuous. In all honesty, I had a very difficult time caring whether Asye would find the Mellified Man or whether her husband would pull off his crooked gas trade. Ferentinou's lost love? Again, my primary reaction was indifference. Probably the only passages I liked 100% were Can's -- though McDonald, apparently, is strangely unaware that there are treatments for Long QT Syndrome even now that don't involve screening out sudden noises with fancy ear plugs.
McDonald is clearly a fine writer at the sentence and paragraph level; the aforementioned descriptions are peppered with many beautiful turns of phrase. But in this particular work, he utterly fails to achieve large-picture coherence. Only the location holds all the threads together, and it does so rather poorly.
Steph's Rating: 5.0
Yawn.
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