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simonfromtaured's review
2.0
Entanglement is a novel about time; the scientific concept of time, the human experience of time, the incomprehensibility of time, and the emotional and psychological ravages of time. It's a novel that doesn't feel fully-baked, full of heavy exposition and blunt metaphor, that doesn't know what to do with all the instruments at it's disposal. It explodes out the gate with mysteries for the reader to solve and emotional threads to pull on, but loses steam quickly as it circles the same ideas and recycles the same beats over and over again.
Entanglement's biggest mountain is it's characters. Not much happens in the novel; this is a book about relationships, both real and remembered, and is most interested in exploring the transcendental properties of love through time. But for a book that is so heavily invested in it's characters, they're woefully underdeveloped. The emotional core of Entanglement is the relationship between the narrator and Anise, the woman he meets in Sydney and eventually marries. But Anise only exists in relation to the narrator; her life beyond this romantic relationship is never explored. She flickers between being a too-good-to-be-true sexual and romantic trophy and a suffering wife, a two-dimensional 'insert-woman-here' in a story about four-dimensional relationships. It's an egregious oversight for any novel to so callously use a female character in such an openly objectifying way, even more so in a novel that hinges on the believably of their emotional connection to propel the entire story forward. Their child together is similarly under-served, existing as a projection of the narrators feelings towards her rather than as an independent person outright. Really every character in Entanglement exists only in orbit around the narrator - his perspective is the only important one, and everyone else is filtered through their relationship and utility to him. A charitable reader might be able to forgive this as a necessity of the structure and ultimate purpose of the text; but it's hard not to interpret the narrator as self-absorbed, narcissistic and emotionally illiterate, a difficult man to empathise with. It makes for very strained reading; Walpert writes frequently and at-length in difficult emotional territory - about the legacy of guilt, being mired in the past, falling out of love, moving through time at different speeds - but very little of it resonates because none of his characters feel like real people. Even the novels narrator is missing necessary dimensions, despite his voice being the most fully realised of any in the book - an author self-insert that only sometimes feels like a real person and at others like an artful representation of a person, designed to hide the deeper messiness of it's inspiration.
My other major complaint is that Entanglement reads like a novel that thinks it's much smarter than it is. It describes itself as "a time travel novel like no other", and this kind of intellectual arrogance is on display throughout; Walpert dedicates long, rambling passages to layman's descriptions of the cutting edge of philosophical and scientific study into the nature of time, the structure is non-linear (though surprisingly rigid) and it utilises first, second and third-person narration in each of it's three sections. The result is a novel that grants itself more leeway that it really ought to in service of a central conceit that isn't as ground-breaking as it thinks, jerking awkwardly between narrative voices and stumbling regularly into dull academic description. The central themes of Entanglement were perhaps best summed up 7 years ago in the 2014 film Interstellar far more concisely: "Love is the one thing that transcends time and space". The ideas of Entanglement are not going to be new to audiences; they've been explored and articulated in media for decades, even centuries, but Walpert treats then like they are new ground, laboriously laying the groundwork for revelations most readers will have seen 200 pages back. Walpert is also preoccupied with the same metaphors and motifs, recycling them ad nauseum to the point that it strains belief. Nobody in the real world is so singularly preoccupied by events, people and places as the characters in Entanglement. By the end of the novel there is the distinct impression that these people exist in a vacuum outside of the key events described to us, interacting with nobody that isn't critical to the progression of the narrative, engaging with nothing that doesn't propel the plot forward. It only adds to the two-dimensional feel of these characters to have them be so empty beyond the single narrative thread we are following. Entanglement subscribes to the Ludovico Method in it's deployment of allusory techniques, hammering them over and over again so they are impossible to miss, and so impossible to truly appreciate.
It's disappointing that Entanglement misses the mark in so many ways, because there is also a lot to love about this novel. The prose is poetic and deeply-felt; with more believable characters, it could have been beautiful and devastating. While not wholly original, the story Walpert has crafted is tragic and moving; if he weren't so preoccupied with trying to outsmart his audience, a simpler telling could have been much more compelling. A novel that aims for the sun and instead plunges into the ocean, perhaps the most incisive critique of Entanglement comes from the text itself: I began to sense I was reading what should have been early-stage draft material, not published work, material that revealed, to anyone who paid close attention, an impoverished worldview, that I skated on a thin layer of ice above the lake of experience."
On a less significant note, this doesn't read like 'New Zealand Fiction', which admittedly is a nebulous term, but the infrequent mentions of New Zealand feel more like a dart-on-the-map choice than a purposeful, meaningful inclusion. Regional publishers are not beholden to publishing novels that exclusively utilise distinctly local voices, but I was surprised that Mākaro Press chose to publish this given it's lack of Kiwi-flavour.
Entanglement's biggest mountain is it's characters. Not much happens in the novel; this is a book about relationships, both real and remembered, and is most interested in exploring the transcendental properties of love through time. But for a book that is so heavily invested in it's characters, they're woefully underdeveloped. The emotional core of Entanglement is the relationship between the narrator and Anise, the woman he meets in Sydney and eventually marries. But Anise only exists in relation to the narrator; her life beyond this romantic relationship is never explored. She flickers between being a too-good-to-be-true sexual and romantic trophy and a suffering wife, a two-dimensional 'insert-woman-here' in a story about four-dimensional relationships. It's an egregious oversight for any novel to so callously use a female character in such an openly objectifying way, even more so in a novel that hinges on the believably of their emotional connection to propel the entire story forward. Their child together is similarly under-served, existing as a projection of the narrators feelings towards her rather than as an independent person outright. Really every character in Entanglement exists only in orbit around the narrator - his perspective is the only important one, and everyone else is filtered through their relationship and utility to him. A charitable reader might be able to forgive this as a necessity of the structure and ultimate purpose of the text; but it's hard not to interpret the narrator as self-absorbed, narcissistic and emotionally illiterate, a difficult man to empathise with. It makes for very strained reading; Walpert writes frequently and at-length in difficult emotional territory - about the legacy of guilt, being mired in the past, falling out of love, moving through time at different speeds - but very little of it resonates because none of his characters feel like real people. Even the novels narrator is missing necessary dimensions, despite his voice being the most fully realised of any in the book - an author self-insert that only sometimes feels like a real person and at others like an artful representation of a person, designed to hide the deeper messiness of it's inspiration.
My other major complaint is that Entanglement reads like a novel that thinks it's much smarter than it is. It describes itself as "a time travel novel like no other", and this kind of intellectual arrogance is on display throughout; Walpert dedicates long, rambling passages to layman's descriptions of the cutting edge of philosophical and scientific study into the nature of time, the structure is non-linear (though surprisingly rigid) and it utilises first, second and third-person narration in each of it's three sections. The result is a novel that grants itself more leeway that it really ought to in service of a central conceit that isn't as ground-breaking as it thinks, jerking awkwardly between narrative voices and stumbling regularly into dull academic description. The central themes of Entanglement were perhaps best summed up 7 years ago in the 2014 film Interstellar far more concisely: "Love is the one thing that transcends time and space". The ideas of Entanglement are not going to be new to audiences; they've been explored and articulated in media for decades, even centuries, but Walpert treats then like they are new ground, laboriously laying the groundwork for revelations most readers will have seen 200 pages back. Walpert is also preoccupied with the same metaphors and motifs, recycling them ad nauseum to the point that it strains belief. Nobody in the real world is so singularly preoccupied by events, people and places as the characters in Entanglement. By the end of the novel there is the distinct impression that these people exist in a vacuum outside of the key events described to us, interacting with nobody that isn't critical to the progression of the narrative, engaging with nothing that doesn't propel the plot forward. It only adds to the two-dimensional feel of these characters to have them be so empty beyond the single narrative thread we are following. Entanglement subscribes to the Ludovico Method in it's deployment of allusory techniques, hammering them over and over again so they are impossible to miss, and so impossible to truly appreciate.
It's disappointing that Entanglement misses the mark in so many ways, because there is also a lot to love about this novel. The prose is poetic and deeply-felt; with more believable characters, it could have been beautiful and devastating. While not wholly original, the story Walpert has crafted is tragic and moving; if he weren't so preoccupied with trying to outsmart his audience, a simpler telling could have been much more compelling. A novel that aims for the sun and instead plunges into the ocean, perhaps the most incisive critique of Entanglement comes from the text itself: I began to sense I was reading what should have been early-stage draft material, not published work, material that revealed, to anyone who paid close attention, an impoverished worldview, that I skated on a thin layer of ice above the lake of experience."
On a less significant note, this doesn't read like 'New Zealand Fiction', which admittedly is a nebulous term, but the infrequent mentions of New Zealand feel more like a dart-on-the-map choice than a purposeful, meaningful inclusion. Regional publishers are not beholden to publishing novels that exclusively utilise distinctly local voices, but I was surprised that Mākaro Press chose to publish this given it's lack of Kiwi-flavour.
serendipitysbooks's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
I picked up Entanglement because it was the only book on the Ockham (New Zealand book prize) fiction shortlist that I hadn’t read. It’s about a memory impaired time-traveller who attempts to correct a mistake he made in 1976, one which had further tragic ramifications decades later. What particularly grabbed my attention with this book was the three separate but interleaved modes of narration. I was fully engaged in the story as the different sections came together and key plot elements were revealed. My main quibble was the amount of technical and philosophical discussions about time travel. But that’s only because it’s not something I’m interested in.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief
Moderate: Violence
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