[.ca] Plowing the Dark (ISBN 0374234612)

From Amazon.com:
No one who enjoyed Richard Powers's remarkable breakthrough novel, Galatea 2.2, will be surprised that he has returned to the richly promising realm of cyber-invention, one of our age's few remaining frontiers and a siren call to restless intellects. In Plowing the Dark, an old friend recruits a disillusioned New York artist named Adie Klarpol to work on "the Cavern." TeraSys, a Seattle-based company, is building this virtual environment at great expense in the hope that it will lower its enormous tax liability as well as, in the long run, provide the template for all such virtual playrooms. "Millions of dollars of funding," Adie's friend Steve tells her when she arrives on the job, "and nobody around this dump can draw worth squat." Suitably impressed by the Cavern's programming, and slowly absorbing its dazzling capacity to project vivid and convincing illusions, she sets herself the task of creating a faithful 3-D version of Rousseau's Dream. Her painstaking efforts in the Realization Lab are aided by a host of supporting characters, one of whom, Spider Lim, proves so sensitive that he gets a bruise from bumping into one of Adie's virtual tree branches. And when the central female figure appears among the foliage, Lim is irresistibly drawn in, marveling that their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this--this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the Limaçon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate. Powers's lush language corresponds to Adie's vision of Rousseau's jungle, and in turn to Rousseau's own ecstatic vision. Yet there is also something elegiac in the author's lavish descriptions of the Cavern's miracles, as if he were offering a late, last flowering of words before the cultural ascendancy of the image. Great, quotable chunks weight every page. Even readers fond of extravagant prose may find Powers's verbal persistence wearying, though it argues that there are still contradictions and subtleties of mind that no image can track. --Regina Marler

Thought-provoking, but hard to get into:
It took me three tries over the course of a year to get started reading this book; each time I'd get a few dozen pages in and then give up. But the concept - paralleling the stories of the creators of a virtual reality system in Seattle with that of a man held hostage in Beirut, with liberal doses of Yeats, Byzantium and personal angst thrown in - was so intriguing I kept giving it another try, and eventually it took. Still, it's a dense book, full of half-explained concepts and obscure literary references, and it's not for everyone. Sometimes you can get several paragraphs into a chapter before you figure out who's speaking; given the subject matter, I'm sure the resulting sense of disorientation is intentional on Powers' part. "Plowing" explores the world of the internal - everything that happens in the outside world, from failed love affairs to Tianamen Square, has an internal side effect on the characters. Even some of the dialog between people is in italics, like thoughts rather than words. Powers weaves together several stories that illustrate his themes of immersion and isolation: the brilliant mind trapped in a crumbling body, the blind-folded hostage, the computer programmers working day and night to create virtual reality while losing track of the real reality. In all the characters, the hidden internal world, with its past injustices and hurts, has to work itself out before the person can rejoin the outside world. To really appreciate this book, I think you have to be able to step back and look at what Powers is doing. Trying to enjoy it for plot alone could be frustrating and confusing. By the end you have a pretty full sketch of each character, but Powers doesn't lay it all out for you - you have to piece things together as you go along. As an English major, I enjoyed doing the detective work, but it's not for everyone. Knowing a bit about Yeats' life and themes before you begin would enhance understanding of this book. It also helps to have a general knowledge of world events in 1989-90 (Tianamen Square, Beirut, the Berlin Wall), because while Powers does a great job of capturing how it felt to watch these iconic events unfold on television, he doesn't always explain what he's talking about. Overall, "Plowing" was challenging but intriguing. It wasn't always engrossing, but it felt good to finish it, like I had figured out something rather than just been entertained.

Plowing the Dark:
An hour after I have finished reading Plowing the Dark, my feelings are still mixed. On one hand, Powers' prose was simply wonderful with detailed, intricate sentences spilling from every page. The two alternate sections were cut to and from in such a way that I never felt like I was reading the 'wrong' part of the storyline, and I was always anxious to return to the other thread. On the other hand, the storyline pretty much didn't exist, it was more of a two year chunk of life, which is fine normally, but when the ending - as such there was - seemed as tacked on as it did, I was a little disappointed. But first the two plots. One deals with a virtual reality room being created, the 'Cavern', and we watch as the main character, Adie, learns about it and comes to terms with it. The premise for it is very interesting, but it never really went anywhere: They simply sat around making the Cavern better for two years. While the interaction between people was certainly interesting, and the little comments on society that Powers allowed himself were insightful, I was left wondering what the point of it all was. The second seems completely unrelated, and for the most part it is. A teacher, Tai, has moved to the Middle East to teach willing students conversational English, and soon after he arrives, he is kidnapped and held as a political hostage. Each of these scenes - and there were many - involving his capture and incarceration were written from a 'you look over there, you do this' type perspective, which really worked. Because it is natural for a reader to expect that he will be freed by the end of the book, his section certainly had a clear beginning, middle and end that I could hold on to while the other thread of the story meandered. But then, at the end, the two storylines come together in a way that to me, seems completely impossible and contrived. The end existed merely to bring an end to the book and to connect two completely disparate lives. Which is a shame, because by the end of the book I was fully immersed into both Adie and Tai's lives, what they had been and what they wanted to become. In a way, I felt cheated by the tenuous link forged between them, but to be honest I had no idea how the author could possibly put the two ideas together. They are not even remotely similar: an artist working on the age's greatest technological achievement and a captured Muslim-American. I certainly couldn't link the two together, and clearly neither could the author. But the writing was good, very good in some parts, and the philosophy behind the Cavern was interesting. I'd recommend it for a reader who wants to enjoy what is happening, but not to expect anything meaningful in terms of story.

I think I got a different version than most of the reviewers:
Who's kidding who?! This book was horrible! I couldn't finish it -- as much as I wanted to. It was boring and repetitive. The story dragged worse than T.Clancy's Bear and the Dragon! I think Powers should have written an entire book about the hostage -- that thread was the only thing that kept me coming back. Ultimately, though, it wasn't enough to keep me reading; I switched to the excellent "Newjack" by Ted Conover.

Clever idea that falls far short.:
An outline of this book would be riveting. It's basic framework is smart and has a great deal of potential, but then the writing undoes it all. Powers spends too much time proving how very clever and erudite he is, dropping names and obscure references at every opportunity, and winds up neglecting the compelling part of the story. It was painful in places, particularly wading through the heavy-handed techno-geek dialogue that tropes being hip, but winds up sounding affected and self-indulgent. The secondary plot, as others have mentioned, is far more compelling than the primary plot. Scores of pages are spent fetishizing technology and 'The Cavern'. It's really cool, Richard. We get it. If Powers spent more time on his character development and less time trying to impress us with his unabridged thesaurus, this would be a far more enjoyable read.

Blinkered intelligence:
Mr.Powers possesses grand ambition. He chooses to write about large and potentially profound topics. In this novel he gestures towards the potential use and abuse of the human imagination - the image he chooses is that of a blank white room, suggesting the interior of a human skull along with the proverbial bare page confronting a budding author. In one strand of the novel, this room is filled with borrowed art and other worldly concerns, imaginatively re-invented through recent computer technology. In the other strand, an isolated mind first covers the walls with memories, focused upon a former lover, and later partly disintegrates through lack of contact with the outside world. Salient to each situation is the idea of how much effort should be devoted to representing the world, and how much to living in it - while not a simple moralist, Powers seems to be warning against representation divorced from any heed to social and political realities, be these personal or global; that is to say, he at least complicates the notion of art for art's sake. The danger of becoming obsessed with the image, and forgetting the reality, is explored through the ultimate use made of the beauty of the virtual room, and through references to religions', particularly Islam's, prohibitions on representation. Powers also seems to be making a plea that we all need each other, for in high-tech Seattle, a team of people must work together in order to succeed, while in the hostage's cell in Lebanon, a mind atrophies when denied company. * At the end of the book, Powers acknowledges a debt to the memoirs of Western hostages held in Lebanon. His research certainly gives realism to this part of the story. He also uses literary techniques favoured by bestselling authors, such as Stephen King, to grasp the readers' attention. Thus, the protagonist, Taimur Martin, is quickly placed in jeopardy, he experiences pain and humiliation, and the entire tale relies on the tension in waiting for his potential release or escape. In a sense, this is all legitimate and engaging storytelling, but it does have a cliched and manipulative aspect. The depiction of the suffering mind is partly convincing, but pales when compared to, say, Solzhenitsyn, or Primo Levi (very high standards, admittedly). A weakness is also revealed in Power's ability to create characters - Taimur's thinks and converses with his captors much like he does with his remembered lover and, what is more, much like the way Adie and Steve and the all others in Seattle deal with each other. Prime among the conversational strategies of all these characters is a recourse to weak humour - weak puns, irony, and benign sarcasm - in Seattle this is merely annoying, but in the context of horrible depravation in Lebanon it is distracting, unconvincing, and inappropriate. * The Seattle strand of the book makes up its bulk - around three quarters of its pages. It is structured as a quest. This exact same structure is used by Powers in 'The Gold Bug Variations' and in 'Galatea 2.2'. Again, it is a proven way to co-opt a reader's interest, but in this novel the mechanism is obvious, and the quest itself of questionable appeal - consequently it feels rather crude. There are a large number of characters - they are differentiated by quirks and mannerisms, yet in conversation they blend, in part due to the failed humour mentioned previously, and also due to the relentless parading of references to works of art, literature, and music. This parade is especially galling as there seems to be an implicit thesis that in order to be part of the club of 'intelligent', 'interesting' people, one must be familiar with a canon of 'great works' - the works chosen are very conservative, as in other of Powers' books, and can not legitimately be said to be simply alerting the reader to the existence of works otherwise unknown. Another shared characteristic, both within this novel and across Powers' other books, is the attitude taken towards, and the depiction of, love. Every character adopts a nostalgic stance to love. Love largely occurs in the past; love is passive and motivates few actions; when love does bear consequences, as in the birth of a child, then this is rendered in a perfunctory, almost abstract way. It is as if Powers' wants love to be important, but is unskilled in actually embodying it living within his story. His characters are emotional adolescents. The core of this problem lies in his refusal to address the darker currents in human nature. If his characters have sins, then they are ones of omission. Malice, hate, true envy, jealousy, are not genuinely present; consequently his characters 'do' very little to each other. If they are reprehensible, it is for their lack of constancy or lack of passion. They are bland and, at the very least, half empty. Powers is never going to create a Macbeth, or a Hamlet, or an Iago. You might think that those holding and abusing Taimur in Lebanon embody darker forces, but they are hardly characters, being inarticulate and skeletal, and so their malice is not embodied but abstract. * Powers' language deserves special comment. I am baffled by those who call it poetic or beautiful. To me, it is ungainly, approximating the abbreviated rhythms heard in technical gatherings, conferences, or in recent journalism. It reads more like an introductory paragraph in 'New Scientist' or in 'Wired' than a poem. There is a laziness to his insistence of adding an extra clause, or several, when a single, well-crafted one would be far more potent and graceful (to some extent Don Delillo shares this failing, and he too is revered by some for his style). For beauty in prose I would turn to John Hawkes, or Samuel Beckett, or Denis Johnson. * Overall, it is hard to recommend this book. Powers has strengths, and these are probably best showcased in 'The Gold Bug Variations'. He has glaring deficiencies too. I doubt he will overcome them, since his writing, in its detail and in its overall structure, has not progressed from that novel to this. To read him is to come into contact with an 'encyclopedic' mind, as widely said, but, for mine, it is a mind in many ways immature.