The Weaver Fish

Thank you Net Galley. This is a hard book to categorize. I will just say that the book was fascinating and engrossing. It made me laugh and ponder and reason. Highly recommended.

The reviews I read about this book said that it was a hard read. Well, they were right. Full of scientific, historical and linguistic facts, it's hard to discern whether they are real or made up (thank you, Google for your help). Some parts were so beautifully written, that they were enjoyable to read: philosophical digressions about the act of dreaming, a legend involving the elusive weaver fish and the story of the historical rivalry between two families, to name a few. Others... well, I may not have been smart enough to get them and they were hard to get through. I mostly read for entertainment and, as much as I enjoy it when a book challenges me, this was just too much hard work. I'd give five stars to the parts that I liked, but it would be hard to rate the parts that I went over my head. I will make it three stars. If you're a smart person looking for a challenging book, this is just for you. If you're just looking for entertainment, you may be better off with a more conventional novel.

My review as posted on Goodreads:

I am writing about the forthcoming edition of this book. I believe it was first published in 2014. I was drawn to it by the eclectic range of reviews which I read. After the first few chapters I have become totally confused. Reading this novel is a surreal experience. It is like waking from a series of weird dreams.

Eventually the story started to settle on a more conventional pattern set in Western Australia. Indeed it seemed to be developing into a fast paced thriller. However the underlying surrealism was never far from the surface.

By the end I was still not sure whether I had read a thriller, a piece of original science fiction or a philosophical novel. However I enjoyed the book, even though I didn't fully understand why.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher, Aardvark Bureau for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

How appropriate that this is released on April 1st! If you like Umberto Eco then this might be an excellent choice: hugely imaginative, playful, erudite and downright bonkers in places, this is certainly mis-categorised as 'crime' and will disappoint or puzzle if that's what you expect when you come to it.

Instead, It's a literary tour-de-force that jumps from the sinister yet beautiful weaver fish, to dream theory, flying, maths and language. What it shares with Eco is a dazzling yet lightly-worn erudition and intellectual stretch, but it's warmer and more human than Eco. The playful names reminded me of Dickens (Tossentern, Feckles, Reckles - say them out loud) as does the way the narrative connects in unexpected ways.

There's no point even starting to talk about 'plot', if such a thing exists, but that's really not the point of the book anyway. This is bold, and clever, and deliciously complex, but with a humanity and sense of humour that leavens the erudition. Not a book to relax with, this keeps you on your toes and your mind active.

A bold and quirky choice from Gallic Books who are one of the most interesting contemporary publishers I've come across - thanks for a review copy via Netgalley.

To be posted on Amazon.

Even though reading Robert Edeson’s The Weaver Fish made me feel simultaneously smarter and stupider, I’m glad I took a chance on this odd story. The Weaver Fish is both thriller and intellectual exercise, cyberpunk and philosophy. I fear that this review will not do the book justice.

The first third of the book is highly academic. There are even excerpts from journals and fabricated works of non-fiction to set the stage for what’s going to come. We learn of a strange chain of islands, the Ferendes, that lie somewhere near the South China Sea. There are strange, rare animals that live there, teasing explorers with their secrets. The excerpts also give us a peek into the mind of one of The Weaver Fish‘s protagonists, the wonderfully named Edvard Tøssentern.

Tøssentern is a transdisciplinary scholar. He builds his ideas from psychology, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, and others. (There are footnotes that involve mathematical equations for beliefs.) The science and philosophy seemed (seemed because there are parts I’m not entirely sure I understood) to create a paradigm of a reality constructed of many small parts that only have meaning because they are observed from a far enough remove. Tøssentern cautions, however, that we can always take another step further back and see the pattern of meaning completely reassemble itself as we gather more contextual data. The theory of taking steps further and further back, plus Tøssentern’s transdisciplinarity made me think of this cartoon I saw on Twitter earlier this week:

Screenshot 2016-03-26 19.07.26

The first third or so of the book made the last half of the book seem entirely unexpected. The last half, rather than being further thought experiments, is a thriller. There are callbacks to events on the Ferendes Islands from the first half—the weaver fish and the Asiatic condor make rather spectacular returns to the main stage. Tøssentern and some of the other punnily named characters from the first third return, but Richard Worse becomes the lead protagonist.

I’m not sure what to make of the juxtaposition of intellectual literary fiction and more-than-usually-thoughtful thriller that makes up The Weaver Fish. It’s possible that the author is up to something so clever I can’t quite puzzle it out. What I can say for sure is that I love the academic jokes I did get, i.e. a character named Penelope Loom that specialized in Homeric Studies. I also liked the notion of meaning appearing and disappearing as more data becomes available. Our brains are wired for patterns, but we need to be aware of the biases this introduces to our thinking. We might think we know what’s going on until some new datapoint messes up our hypotheses.

The other thing I can say for sure about The Weaver Fish is that, as soon as I had finished the book, I wanted to go right back to the beginning and read it again, to see what I would make of it now that I had more information.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

i cannot be enthusiastic enough about this astounding novel - i have not been able to stop reading it - and as I pull into the last pages and write this review, I am already regretting I've finished it. Its central metaphor of the lethal weaver fish informs the way the novel of what seem to be disparate snippets of stories - lost-at-sea; magical animals; scientific detection and linguistical puzzles; dinner parties of arcane explorations and Borges-like inventions of fictitious identities and book titles and scientists and made-up histories - in each case, there are links to other pieces of the novel - mostly by character links - families or in some cases allusions to events or even condors in one case. it's nature also turning on humankind - and then there are wondrous ideas like 'credules' (sp?) which are simply beliefs shared which have no basis in rational evidence - but weave together to form credibility. things turn into each other - and, yet, it is not only the ideas that drew me on - when Richard Worse captures Milly, both with same aim of secretly exploring Fiendish's drawers late at night in Humboldt bank, we watch their developing closeness toward the aim of her being drawn in closer to someone who we thought was a villain. endlessly intriguing - a real tour de force - where has Edeson been? it reminds me of the impact Neal Stephenson had on my years ago when I first read his Cryptonicom. really splendid - everyone should read this!

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Weaver Fish is all over the place. It begins with five chapters that are ostensible scientific journal articles or newspaper pieces about vastly different topics. One of them was a magazine article written about a guy who'd written a book about how to save yourself from an airplane midair disaster by latching onto a plane wing and directing it safely to the ground. Sadly, that Chekov's gun goes unfired, and I was really looking forward to reading about it.

Weaver fish are apparently a real thing? Well, weever fish, and they don't weave themselves into structures, although they are nearly invisible underwater as the book says. And they are venomous, but only through their spines. One theme of the book seems to be "nature will have her revenge" and between the fey weaverfish and a particular species of mosquito described in the book, nature is both purposeful and vengeful. It's sort of a very intellectual version of any of the seventies horror movies you might remember with deadly animals- The Swarm, Willard, Nightwing, Jaws, only a bit more imaginative.

After the first few chapters the book seems to settle into one plot line for a bit. It's the one you're read about on the jacket copy- a seemingly disappeared scientist reappears, and there's some sort of environmental skullduggery. Also, all the characters in the book are incredibly intellectual and love linguistic play (in the verbal sense). Both clever and bad (and sometimes both) puns, plus a lot of elided and double meanings that I probably missed because I was reading too quickly. That's the thing about this book- you have to give it the attention that you would give an academic paper that you must become expert upon, or you will rapidly become lost. There are even footnotes. The writing is so dense that it demands concentration. I like to think of myself as reasonably intelligent, but I wasn't prepared to go quite as deep as this book does. I began to skim which didn't really help me or the book much, but I wasn't willing to give it as much energy as it needs. Be warned- if you're ready to invest a significant portion of time and energy into this, it will probably pay off, but it is not light reading. It reads as sort of escapism for hyper-intellectuals, though.

After settling in to the first part of the story, we suddenly experience a massive shift- a character appears and becomes the POV character for most of the rest of the book. He is a mathematics don and also James Bond for his own amusement. Seriously. He can subvert a security system, clone a phone, fight like a son of a bitch, suffer an attack of gallantry and help a damsel rescue her scientist brother, mock the assassins sent to kill him with puns about physics, and figure probabilities in seconds. More escapism for hyper-intellectuals. I thought it was kind of funny, but was also kind of uncomfortable at the somewhat elitist disdain for the mundane that cropped up here and there. Also, this mathematics mercenary was the victim of insta-love, as far as I can tell because he accidentally grabbed a boob in a fight and then discovered his opponent was a woman.

So many tropes subverted. Is it fun? Maybe. For me it was too much work to be as much fun as it could have been. But I'm pretty mundane.