A good mix of styles is something
that I really like to read. I believe that stepping out from our comfort zone is
gratifying both for readers and writers and always a blow of fresh air. Lately,
I’m being lucky, reading lots of books that push the genre further or contribute with details of others genres, using
them and creating a different and original product.
The Buried Life is more or less that.
At first, it appears to be a Steampunk novel (because of the initial setting);
later, it becomes post-apocalyptic, because of a cataclysm annihilating the
place. The novel also has details from urban fantasy, so we are reading a
history full of shades.
Carrie Patel has created the Recoletta
city and she show us around by the hand of two main characters: a detective
called Liesl Malone and Jane, the laundress. Malone is a hard-boiled detective
and she wears black clothes. Not a cliché
at all (Salander). And Jane who is all the opposite: kind, with lots of friends,
hardworking and honest. Malone has to investigate the murders in the city of
some members of the Council. Like it usually happens in noir and crime fiction,
the main detective will investigate in a self-reliant way.
Recoletta is a city dominated by the
Council, that rules over every entity like factories or local authorities. The
Council, of course, controls the capacity of accessing information.
When I was speaking of Steampunk I
was talking about some very typical details inside this genre. Society has gone
back to a level of technology similar to the one in the Victorian age. There are
trains and a subway, but there are no cars - people still use carriages. The
fashion and society are also built in a way that reminds of that Steampunk that
we all have in mind when we think about its usual definition.
Is it that difficult to leave the clichés of Steampunk aside? Later, the
novel will follow other paths (something more post-apocalyptic), but I can’t
stop thinking about the little of Steampunk that this boos has: it’s the most
common and simple. As though you need to put ghosts in cemeteries in a ghost
story or a hero that kills dragons in a fantasy story. I believe that Steampunk
can contribute a lot and it’s really versatile, but it seems that so far, few
writers dare to play and experiment with it.
Anyway, there is a problem in the
novel and it’s that we don’t figure out where we are. We don’t know if it’s a
new and alternative world, if it fits in our own planet or if it’s a future
version of it. At the end of the novel we will have more details about this
question, but I think it would be positive for the reading experience if this
data was given before, because it doesn’t do the same effect when showing up so
late in the story.
I don’t have many reading obsessions,
but one of them is really important and it’s the consistency of the story. I
can’t handle stories that ask for suspension of disbelief because I only
believe in what I read. If it wasn’t suggested, named or told, and it suddenly
appears, for me that’s a bad resource. In The Buried Life there are a couple of
scenes just like that, and I suppose they exist just to show how cool detective
Malone can be.
In addition to this, the information
is given easily and without stressing the reader too much. It’s almost impossible
to get lost while reading because we have reminders all along the novel. I
would have liked that mysteries were exactly that: mysteries. But, as a reader,
I didn’t feel challenged by the author. Not so many things kept me reading the
novel, and one of them was the desire to know what happened with that Cataclysm
and why it left the civilization in that condition.
The writing is really good. It does
have quality and, even though the plot is not the strongest point, I think the
descriptions and the way the author writes are surprisingly good. If I’m not mistaken,
this is her first novel and it is the beginning of a saga. Patel shows talent
for telling stories. Even though the plot and its development are not especially
remarkable, the way of telling it is promising and entertaining. For those reasons
why I’m going to keep on reading the rest of the saga; an author can evolve a
lot between one book and the next.
The illustrations of the novel are
really astonishing. I think that the cover is gorgeous and it ’is really
attractive. But that is usually the case with all Angry Robot book covers.
The Buried Life is a novel that
initiates a promising saga. If the readers get over the 50% of the novel, they
will find that the story becomes more and more addictive and they will need to
read the next novel. Personally, I hope the next one to have more quality than
this one, even though I don’t think it is a bad book, just full of clichés. It is not an original story,
but it is entertaining and well written.
