[Update, a few weeks removed: I find myself longing for the sheer carnality and ecstatic polychromatic perversity of Brasyl's Brazil(s). This review doesn't give the book enough credit for its powerful atmosphere, which may be a little touristy or cinematic (vs. historical/realistic) but goddamn was it nice to dwell in that world for a while.]
I was swept up by Brasyl and took just a couple of sittings to read its 'cinematic' second half, in which McDonald's tripartite somewhat-cyberpunk narrative begins to pick up speed and answer questions. I recommend it, and if that's all you need then go get 'em, tiger.
[Spoilers follow.]
But this I confess: I never did manage to put aside the frustrations that crept in during the opening chapters. The science in the fiction is a little rickety, and 'quantum' is used as 'magic' might be in epic fantasy; that's par for the course, I suppose, but as the book builds to its grand climax(es) you'll find yourself peering into some worrisome plot holes. You (and McDonald) can get by on atmosphere and energy for most of the book, but it's hard to escape the feeling of anticlimax that settles in during the final 2033 section, when it becomes apparent that the book's great ontological revelation slips by almost unremarked, rendering the final 1733 segment (the book's most action-packed) almost...unnecessary. The multiverse has ended? We're a simulation cooked up by the will-to-live of embodied information? A plucky band of heroes has learned how to escape the Matrix and fight the Agents (excuse me, admonitories) with ninja skills? The outcome of the final battle doesn't particularly matter, since its key metaplot function is to show that the hero has learned how to travel between universes, which revelation occurs off the page? Well, so what: on with the cinematics.
The characters, meanwhile, are mired in type and trope: one Japanese scientist is referred to more often by her 'manga eyes' and dye-bright hair than any other feature or quality, while the castrating career-bitch Marcelina of course falls into syrupy love for her secret lover, realizing it (of course) at the last moment before entering Cosmic Warfare, and of course she's a self-proclaimed 'superhero' with capoeira skills worthy of The Matrix (Brazil Edition) (not an idle comparison, that). Plus her job and circle of friends ('alt dot family,' sigh) come off as unsuccessful attempts at satire, pointed as a TiVo recording of last week's sitcoms.
Never mind that Luis Quinn, the book's clearest authorial fantasy figure, seems to have emerged from The Name of the Rose, stopped off at a showing of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, and then, on his sea voyage to Brazil, picked up some infodumping and unbearably-tacky-'cute'-anachronism tips from Neal Stephenson and every steampunk poseur ever born. McDonald's attempts at humanizing and psychologizing Quinn (the metal-tankard story) seem hamfisted, as does the sub-Aubrey/Maturin friendship between Quinn and the less detailed Falcon.
McDonald's canny choice of Evocative Central Cultural Event - Brazil's loss in the 1950 World Cup final - makes for a fine point of narrative departure, but its role in his tale of quantum-historical divergence smacks of nation-scale psychobiography; nor is it the book's only such feature. How very Great White Male of him, if you like that whole critical-paradigmatic thing. And the fact that the book ends up being about multiverse-spanning conspiracies of comic book heroes and villains, some of whom happen to be Brazilian, doesn't actually ironize the book's closing epigraph (de Gaulle: 'Brazil is not a serious country') as McDonald presumably intends. All of which makes the unevenness of Brasyl's modern-day narrative thread difficult to take.
Then you've got the book's sometimes-overheated prose, weird lapses of taste (a bisexual transvestite hero does not make the book's depiction of sex, particularly women's sexuality, any less tacky), and as-depicted-in-the-movies imagery. It'd be easier to ignore the innumerable resonances between Brasyl and Philip Pullman's equally fast-moving but more self-consciously literary His Dark Materials trilogy if McDonald's main creepytech prop weren't a subtle knife capable of cutting holes in the fabric of the universe.
Yet I was totally involved in the book: snowed under by its sheer velocity, McDonald's obvious love of his various Brazilian settings and figures, its alt-urbanity contrasting nicely with the neo-Tokyo variations beloved of near-future writers. Its shortcomings bugged me, but I found myself wondering despite myself, What happens next? And McDonald keeps delivering the goods, sentences swooping this way and that, moving between scenes with a dancer's dexterity, liberally salting the whole mix with Brazilian slang and just-this-side-of-hip technofetishism. (It helps that the book's topical and cultural concerns are wired directly to my pleasure center, too.)
It took me a while to get through Brasyl, but that's not the book's fault, or not entirely. I kept getting distracted by boring stuff: work, family, pregnancy (not mine, strictly speaking), trips to the library to read about the science that McDonald was obviously not quite doing justice to. Life stuff, in other words; nothing as ecstatically garish and exotic as his titular southern wonderland. What a shame.
And yet I enjoyed the book - and I can't separate the pleasure it gave me from my complaints about its shortcomings. That they didn't ruin the book for me is perhaps McDonald's neatest trick, and I'd like to see him do it again. River of Gods is on the to-read list (as Brasyl should be on yours), but it is very definitely not next. How's that for a recommendation, Reader(s)?
