|
-
News
- Features
- Events
Calendar
- Editorials
- Monthly
Zine
- Offworld
Report
- Our Daily
RSS Feed
- Movie/TV
Reviews
> Recent movies
> Movies by year
> Movies by title
- Book
Reviews
> Recent books
> Books by year
> Books by title
- Home
- Worlds
- Biography
- Bibliography
- Appearances
- Reviews
- Blog
- Community
- Press
- Links
Become
an Advertiser
- Web
Site Directory
- Search
the Net
- StephenHunt.net
- WoodenRocket.com
- Check
your E-mail
- Non Sci-Fi
News
|
Resonance by Chris Dolley
01/11/2005 . Source: Rod MacDonald 
pub: Baen Books. 400 page hardback. $24.00 (US). ISBN: 1-4165-0912-7. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.baen.com
Graham Smith is decidedly an odd chap. Living alone in suburbia, he is so introverted that he talks to nobody and never looks anyone in the eye. He doesn't have television and never listens to radio, preferring instead a good jigsaw, a cup of tea and an early night. As you will have guessed, women don't appear in his life.
If this wasn't bad enough, Smith has compulsive behaviour disorder where a picture on the wall even slightly off the horizontal would prevent him from getting to sleep. He counts everything, is careful where he places his feet on the pavement and assiduously writes detailed notes while working as a messenger boy in a London business. He even carries his own notes, listing his home and work addresses.
Graham Smith seems a bit insecure but so would you or I had we been brought up the same way. It's not that his parents were bad. They would die occasionally only to reappear some years later as if nothing had happened. In fact, everything in his life was precariously placed. Streets would change. Houses appeared and disappeared, likewise colleagues at his work. The world unravelled, or so Graham thought.
This unravelling had taken place many times in his life but it was something you didn't talk about. Keeping his head down, his nose out of other people's business, was the only way he could exist. Nothing stays the same, however, even in such a weird universe. The changes began to happen more often and a woman appeared in his life. Annalise warned that others were out to kill him. Problem was, each time she appeared, she was a slightly different person.
The book's style is rather quaint and so is the setting. The way people are portrayed is reminiscent of a different era, perhaps thirty or more years ago, and one is left wondering if the author wrote this in the past or if he is mentally stuck in a time warp himself. This is Chris Dolley's second book. He's over fifty and now lives in rural France but his origins were in the west country of England where people generally are not so involved in life's rat race and behave with a bit more consideration to each other.
You are drawn into Graham's character and adopt his strange logic on encountering new situations and threats. Things often get bad for the poor chap but changes take place, unravellings perhaps, leaving danger behind each time. When he entered his house to find his deceased mother was back again as a woman he didn't even recognise, it was a bit much even for him.
I began to groan when the plot suggested virtual reality worlds. Not another book where everyone is contained inside a computer, I thought, but thankfully the story shifted away from this to invoke multi-dimensions. Almost as bad, I hear you shout, but the author has an interesting new slant to the theme. With the help of Annalise's many counterparts, Graham is taken to the focus of the problem. Incidentally, like many of us, the main character is seemingly controlled by events. All he wants is a quiet life.
A company called ParaDim is behind the catastrophic changes taking place in the worlds of the dimensions. We discover that resonance throughout the dimensions make actions in one similar to that in another or even the thousands or millions of other worlds. Why is Graham so important? Two reasons become apparent. The first is that he travels between dimensions, albeit without his knowledge and the second, he is the same person throughout all the other worlds.
This isn't half the story. The plot has many interesting turns to take. 'Resonance' is written with hooks at the end of each chapter which encourage you to go on to the next. It's an interesting novel with no shortage of skill and the more it's read, the more you become involved. Some passages are a little tedious, maybe even twee, but this has more to do with Graham's odd character than anything else. The overall verdict is favourable and positive. A good book, Mr. Dolley!
Rod MacDonald
|
|
