Review: The Fractal Prince

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If the first book of this trilogy has a fault, it's the worldbuilding firehose. You just get doused with high-pressure names and words with no explanation, and have to struggle through until it gradually clarifies. This book, if anything, pushes the same fault even harder. For a long time, even having read the first book, I didn't have much idea what was going on in at least one and sometimes both of the two slowly converging storylines, mainly because there was an entirely new jargon vocabulary with absolutely no explanation, and not even much in the way of contextual clues. And by the end, I was once again confused about what exactly had happened in the plot.

The author lists Roger Zelazny among his influences, and I can definitely see it. Not just starting with an amnesiac character in the first book, whose amnesia frees him to be more sympathetic than would otherwise be the case (like Corwin of Amber), and the siblings at each other's throats, but Jack of Shadows , Lord of Light , Isle of the Dead .... There's a general Zelaznian feel to a lot of the ideas and characters, especially the thief and trickster at the centre of the story.

The thing is, though, no matter how weird Zelazny's highly imaginative settings got, he had the gift of orienting you to them with a few well-chosen words (not an extended infodump, just a sentence that made it clear from context what the thing was), so that instead of struggling to figure out what was going on, you could enjoy the wild ride through weirdness. Rajaniemi seems to lack that gift, or not care about using it. Now and again, he does throw in a few words that tell us what one of his neologisms means, but that usually happens after he's already been using it for many chapters, during which time we have had no idea what image to attach to it. The most obvious example is when he says "Masrurs, they are called, jinn insurgents" - this is the seventh (and last) time that the term "masrurs" is used. Why couldn't the author have thrown those five clarifying words in at the first mention instead? Is it actually his intention to leave the reader floundering, not knowing what he's talking about most of the time?

What I did piece together was that the second story here involved an echo of Sheherazade and the Thousand and One Nights, but in a place where fictional stories were forbidden, because, through a vaguely handwaved mechanism, they could be a vector for infection leading to possession by hostile entities. (The author, I think, slips up at one or two points and forgets that fiction is forbidden.) It's also, notably, an Arabian Nights setting without Islam, which is a bit like a medieval European setting without Catholicism: possible, but you have to work hard to leave it out. We have jinni, flying carpets, ghuls, rhuks (rocs), all of which behave at least in some ways like their mythical counterparts, but are given a technological explanation that fits into the world established in Book 1. You have to be very good to make fantasy with an SF excuse work, and I think this author mostly pulls it off, though it does feel a bit like everyone has agreed to live in an Arabian Nights theme park. Also, the SF side eventually breaks down, and we get something that feels very much more like fantasy, or even mysticism, despite all the smartmatter and quantum physics. I was reminded of what Neal Stephenson did with ancient Sumerian in Snow Crash ; the magical power of language is similar in both books.

We also get someone with another Arsene Lupin alias (Don Luis Perenna), though oddly it didn't seem to be the thief who adopted it. It's just a random character in a flashback. This makes it a fourth-wall-breaking Easter egg for Lupin fans, rather than an organic part of the fiction, unless we're meant to conclude that it was, in fact, the thief and he's forgotten that fact and somehow not himself noticed the Lupin tie-in when he gets a third-person version of the memory. There's also a reference to the Lupin novel The Crystal Stopper .

The strengths of the first book were in its characters and its plot; it was emotionally coherent, even when the worldbuilding was confusing. This book, for me, didn't manage to achieve that, and the worldbuilding was even more confusing, to the point where I wondered if that was deliberate. I wasn't particularly moved, just mildly surprised, at the several twists, and honestly I couldn't follow the plot particularly well, or work out all the layers of false identity around the nominal main character (the thief). There are more stumbles over English idioms, too, which, while it's not blameworthy in the author, whose first language is Finnish, is blameworthy in the publisher, who didn't make sure they were edited properly.

Overall, my experience of the book was that the faults of the first book were magnified, while its strengths were reduced or overwhelmed by the faults. It's still very clever, probably too clever, but I found it incoherent, and a disappointing follow-up to a promising first novel. I bought and read it immediately after finishing Book 1, but I'll not be rushing out to get the third book any time soon.

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