There are a few, small instances of meta in River Of Gods, Ian McDonald’s near-future novel set in India, 2047. One of those makes clear McDonald ultimately writes about our reality, and not about made up stuff.
Something it could believe it had not made up itself. It wanted the drama of the real, the fountainhead from which all story flows.
So, what is the drama of the real that River Of Gods serves its readers? A lot of things, it turns out. The book features 9 different POV characters, who are presented one by one in a chapter each. Multiple viewpoint books have a tendency to take a lot of time before the story lines start to intermingle, but this is not the case in River Of Gods: after the introductory chapters, characters soon start to interact with others – some slightly, some full on. This is a good thing, since River Of Gods is complex enough as it is. (More on that complexity later.) These nine characters all feel real, and display real feelings. Drama aplenty in this 588-page book. Some of it violent and in your face, some of it poetic, all of it human. McDonald manages to evoke emotion seemingly easily, like in the quote below, lifted from a passage about cleaning out the house of a deceased mother.
He thinks of her house afterwards, of the terrible poignancy of her clothes and shoes on their hangers and racks, all unnecessary now, all her choices and fancyings and likings naked and exposed by death.
This sentence is so brutally true – everyone who helped in emptying the house of a loved one will recognize. Continue reading
Weighing a pig doesn't fatten it. 