Alexander Páez reviews Summerland, by Hannu Rajaniemi

It is a great pleasure to have Alexander Paéz reviewing for us Hannu Rajaniemi's latest novel: Summerland. Hope you enjoy it and remember that you can read the review in Spanish at Alex's blog, Donde acaba el infinito.

Review soundtrack: Alex suggest reading this review while listening to In The Summertime, by Mungo Jerry (YouTube, Spotify).

I do hold some respect before reading a book by Hannu Rajaniemi. The Quantum Thief was a tough book, full of hard to understand ideas. But it was thrilling and full of that sense of wonder. I did not discover that in his Collected Fiction that I read some years ago, which for me was a little bit weird. Some short stories were really good, and some others not that much. Added to this, I’ve decided since some months ago not to review books that I dislike. But with Summerland I’ll do and exception because I think it holds some great ideas that you may find interesting.

Summerland takes place during the Spanish Civil War and it is told as a chronicle or a story about some secret wars played by the most powerful European countries at the time. So yes, it is a novel about spies. But then fantasy comes in, they have discovered that life and death have no meaning whatsoever. They can communicate with the Dead using some mediums through a possession. A fight to possess and control the Summerland begins.

Hannu Rajaniemi mixes real history events and people with characters, and this gives a perspective to the story and a point for the reader to hold to reality and to certain events. The bad part (and there is always a bad part to every story) is that the characters felt really misused or unused. Some of them feel like tools, some other like “hey, look at this guy, he appears here”. I can’t restrain myself in doing a (maybe unfair) comparison between Summerland and The Last Days of Paris by China Mieville, which blew my mind when I read it. Mieville book does everything right where Summerland just fails.

Summerland was a long awaited project by Rajaniemi, and science takes a huge role in the book. It is Marcone and no one else who discovers this world beyond Dead or Alive. And yes, it is fantasy at its purest, but the huge elements of science work really well in the story. Rajaniemi also takes part in the ongoing gender discussion, but for me it just felt like “agenda”. It’s not elegant at all and it feels like some characters just screaming to the reader “hey, we think women are not weak, you see us? We really think that!”. I wished for a cleverer way to put it. Rajaniemi works best at criticizing politics and some ways the System works.

Some other interesting ideas in Summerland are the safe way to travel to this world beyond with a ticket so the soul can fix itself to the world in order to not disappear. And the interesting idea of a god, or the absolute force. Sadly, I do not recommend this book whatsoever. I felt it was pretty boring for the most part of it, and I had the impression that it was just spinning around. There are a lot of ideas and story parts that I did not enjoy at all, but let’s just leave them aside. I will be waiting for the next Rajaniemi book, overall I think he is a really interesting author to follow.