Review: Signal to Noise

Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reviewing the reprint from Solaris, which I received as an e-arc via Netgalley. There may be changes between what I read and what is finally published; I hope one of them is to fix the vocabulary error "hierophants" for "sycophants," and another is to remove the numerous coordinate commas between non-coordinate adjectives. Otherwise, apart from the odd slightly off turn of phrase that is probably because the author is not writing in her native language, the writing is highly capable.

I've read a couple of Moreno-Garcia books that I very much loved ( The Beautiful Ones and Gods of Jade and Shadow ), and one that didn't work for me and that I abandoned partway through ( Mexican Gothic ). The ones I loved pulled off the move I call the Glorious Ending, where things seem to be going inevitably downhill, because people, but then someone does a truly loving and wise thing and turns the looming tragedy into triumph. The one I didn't love was, I think, the wrong genre for me (the Gothic novel). I found this one closer, unfortunately, to Mexican Gothic than to the other two; it's an 80s-nostalgia book, a very-into-music book, a coming-of-age novel, and features a protagonist who is dealing with her pain by shoving it onto other people, none of which endeared it to me. I did finish it, though.

I grew up in the 80s, though I'm about seven years older than the main characters in this book; they're 15 and at high school in 1989, and I was in my last year at university by then. I wasn't into pop culture, and certainly not popular music, in the 80s, either, which makes me an atypical 80s kid and also means that 80s nostalgia properties don't connect with me all that well. A lot of the music referenced here is in Spanish, as well, since the story is set in Mexico City, and I don't have a frame of reference for it at all. I know some of the better-known English-language songs, like "A Whiter Shade of Pale," but the thing about very-into-music books is that the things that are so evocative for the characters don't necessarily translate for the reader unless that reader is also into the same music and in the same way. The title of a song is just a series of words if you don't have any emotional or cultural context for it, and because the music is so central to the main character, it carries a lot of meaning for her - but little or none for me.

The evocation of the setting is otherwise rich and powerful, I assume because the author is writing from her own experience. There's a decent amount of skill shown, too, in the dual timeline, 1989 and 2009, in the same setting with some of the same characters; a young woman who has escaped from Mexico City to work in Europe as a computer programmer comes back for her father's funeral and has to face up to what happened 20 years before, including a betrayal that is teased for some time before being revealed, which makes sense out of so much of what has gone before.

Unfortunately, though, I didn't get from this book the full Glorious Ending that I got from a couple of the author's later works. The ending is slightly more hopeful than everything preceding it has necessarily prepared the reader for, but only slightly, and I can't help cynically wondering if the relationship that's tentatively (re)formed at the end is doomed by the fact that, honestly, the main character is not well equipped for loving relationships by either nature or nurture.

These are alienated characters who are mostly dealing badly with the disappointments of life (with the exception of the female best friend, Daniela, who, while a bit spineless, genuinely enjoys a relatively conventional life and finds fulfilment in it), and who are, as teenagers, striving earnestly for outcomes that would not actually make them happy and are a bad idea, by means that will cost them more than they realize. As a matter of personal taste, I don't enjoy following such characters, and that's reflected in my low rating for the book.

This is one of those cases where the execution is good, but the book is just not for me.

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