Has it really been four years since I read the first book in the Bobby Dollar series, The Dirty Streets of Heaven? I really jumped on that one, but by the time I got around to the second, the whole series was finished.The Bobby Dollar series is remarkable in a number of ways. First, it's not high fantasy like the awesome Memory Sorrow and Thorn books or the lackluster Shadowmarch series. And it isn't science fiction like Otherland. It's in that ill-defined genre probably best called "urban fantasy" where you find your Jim Butchers and Neil Gaimans. Second, the books (at least the first two) are not gigantic, each around 400 pages. Finally, from what I've seen, for the first time, Tad Williams managed to write a trilogy that stayed a trilogy! Sure, I've got the 1200+ page To Green Angel Tower, originally a concluding book 3, but now repackaged as a third and fourth book (Siege and Storm). Supposedly no paperback binding could hold it in one volume!
Last time I met the angel Doloriel (street name: Bobby Dollar), he was bouncing around the streets of the fictional San Judas. If you live anywhere between San Francisco and San Jose, you may be quick to notice that it is a parallel-universe conglomeration of pretty much everything between San Carlos and Mountain View, with Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Atherton being name-checked as "districts" and "downtown" is pretty much Redwood City. It was both cool (because I could relate), and distracting (because I kept trying to figure out if such-and-such bar was some place I actually knew). For about the first 100 pages or so, the San Judas action continues in this book. While, for the aforementioned reasons, I'm not too disappointed with San Judas, it felt like Tad Williams was punting a little in the world-building department, something he did very well (world building, not punting) in the Memory Sorrow and Thorn and Otherland books (Shadowmarch....let us not speak any more of this series). Well, things went straight to Hell right after that, and I mean that in the best possible way. Hell, which was the setting for almost the entire rest of the book, is a truly diabolical experience. Williams created a Hell that would make Hieronymus Bosch run for the exits and it has about a million more levels than Dante's Inferno. Even "high-class" Hell is horrific by Earth standards, and the lowest levels are beyond comprehension.
While Tad gets an A for world-building in this one, way improved over the first book, unfortunately it is a lot of fancy bunting for a meh love story. Maybe I'm not as passionate a person as Bobby Dollar, but it seemed like the whole trip to Hell, as wild a ride for the reader as it was, may not have been wholly necessary. I won't even tread near "the twist" -- and there is always one of those -- but once I was allowed to come back up for air in San Judas near the end of the novel, I had to suppress a shrug. You did all of that just to get that? Oh well, there is always book 3, Sleeping Late on Judgement Day. Be sure to look for my review of this final book of the series in 2019!
This book is pretty easy to find at public libraries. A lot of people I know are big on collecting (as in actually buying) the books, because they have pretty artwork, and you can meet the author and get them autographed, and so forth, but I kind of felt burned by Shadowmarch and demoted Tad to library-only and so far I've been fine with the decision. If you mostly know Tad from his other series, be advised that this one likes to toss in more robust sex and language in addition to the violence, so I would think before buying these as presents for your under-15 family member, especially if they've never watched an R-rated movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment