22. Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

By: Cory Doctorow

You have to love Cory Doctorow- not only does he provide hours of entertainment through his contributions to one of my favorite procrastination tools Boing Boing, but he releases his novels for free under a creative commons license. Therefore, you can download Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town for free... however, there is something about actually holding a book as you read it, and that's the way I had to proceed.

Speaking of surreal, SCT,SLT reads like two seperate styles of novel rolled into one. On the "real" side- Alan moves to Toronto in order to write a book. There he meets some people, one of whom wants to create a free WiFi system using junk parts for the whole city, and Alan joins him in his campaign. On the "surreal" side, Alan's parents are a washing machine and a mountain, his brothers are a set of nesting dolls, a psychic, an island, an undead homicidal maniac - and his new girlfriend has wings. The plots run parallel to each other, not so much intertwining as occasionally bumbing into each other; and that's ok. The character doesn't understand who or what he is - the book doesn't seem to either. And yet, that doesn't detract from it too much, as bouncing back and fourth from plot to plot, from reality to reality gives the book its momentum.

The Wifi plot is exactly what I'd expect from Doctorow- in fact, it often reads like a novelization of Boing Boing; theres a lot of offbeat pop-counter-culture (cause is counter culture and pop culture really that different anymore?) references mashed in with some techno-babble, and a good many rants about censorship, freedom of information, and the democratization of the internet.

The more surreal plot rings a bit clunky, but perhaps that's my own bias. I was thinking about this after finishing Creul Shoes and I think it just comes down to the fact that I'm not as big a fan of Surrealism in writing as I am of it in art. When you look at a Surrealist painting - a good painting, its almost empowering to let it speak to you, to try to understand its secrets. In the written form, it just comes accross as different for the sake of difference. And it might just be something I don't get, although I'm open for an explanation.

The other odd thing about it, is that a book that is so much a commentary and refelction of its time, and this book is more 21st century literature than anything else I've read, it totally ignores the 21st century political landscape. I don't know if that is a bad thing or not. Certainly not everything thats written about the 21st century needs to address the mess that the Neocons made of the world. Its also likely that I'm being America-centric about a book takes place in Canada. However, I've never been so aware of the world changing around me as I am today, and it seems a little odd that this goes unacknowledged by the book. Perhaps there's an alegory trapped in the surreal part of the story that I'm missing.