Bandwidth

I haven't read a Peper since last august, and if truth be known I haven't read a new book in over 3 weeks. I don't get reading drought very often, but it's frustrating when I do. I was encouraged to pick this up because it's not generally available yet, and so providing an early review may encourage people to buy it when it officially comes out at the beginning of May.

Normally, when I read any sort of thriller or detective story, I'm not one to stop and think. Either I get a burst of adrenaline because my instincts were proved right and I saw something coming, or I'm convinced I'm a blind idiot who couldn't pin a murderer with gunpowder on his fingers. Rarely do I stop to consider, because I'm too selfish to want the story to unfold.

In Bandwidth, though, I was almost prescient: when Dag hides his kayak, observes Kim at breakfast, asks for paper in Analog and when Emmanuel gets the jump on him at the market I was able to see, almost as if I had read it a long, long time ago, what was to come next. I had that thrill of being proved mentally correct time and time again, and that helped ensure a huge sense of satisfaction whilst reading.

I read a little yesterday evening, paused to watch half an hour of something with the little one before putting her to bed, another chapter before I, too, retired. But I was awake, before 5 in the morning, the cold, pre-dawn light little comfort. I sat up in bed, gorging myself on this crazily addictive story - and it was there, the cold April air freezing my shoulders and upper body, that I read Chapter 33. I couldn't put it down after that; and the sun and birds were well up before I closed the book with a profound sense of "more, please!"

Of course, we need more in both directions now, please, mr. Peper. We need to go forward, of course, we need to know the impact of what's happened here, but we also need to go back and see precisely how the feed came to be. What you've painted here is serious and heavy - also "very noir", of course - and I can almost guarantee I'll read it again before the year is out to get more shades of meaning, see the deeper nuances. But even having done that, I do think there's scope to go back, to fill in back story of the technology, the sociology and psychology of a recession-torn world falling into something like the feed. You have, as the poet says, miles to go before you sleep with this one, and I hope you can continue to flush out the world and fill in the detail in many such exquisite novels to come. I'll be pre-ordering anything as soon as it becomes available.