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A review by abbywdan
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
3.0
I thought I was past the part of my life where books were academic slogs, but along came The Flame Alphabet. The first half of this novel made me feel like a high school freshman sitting through a college seminar I thought I was prepared for. It felt like reading Great Expectations in third grade and NOT GETTING IT. It felt like reading The Awakening in eighth grade and NOT GETTING IT. It felt like reading Seven Gothic Tales in college and NOT GETTING IT. But I'm thirty years old and I'm smart, so instead of deciding that I wasn't getting it, I just kept reading.
The first half of the novel begins with the middle of the story, backtracks to the beginning, and then catches you up. That catchup, where you know it's all leading, takes forever, and the timeline loops all over the place, and there's a wonderful aside about having people over to your house whose children destroy your things and whose shits destroy your toilet, but mostly, it's a tangle of backstory that doesn't shed enough light on the situation at hand but does introduce you to important ideas and vignettes that are important later on. They're there, so they must be important, it's just hard to remember to see that when you feel like you're at sea.
Then, halfway through, you get sucked toward the falls. The plot catches up, the theory and the metaphor and the themes start to make more sense, and it all become oddly satisfying. I'm still not going to claim to get it all, but I do get parts of it. I thought the tie-in to Judaism (not real Judaism, I think, but a metaphorical, future underground religion based on it) was really interesting. I thought the effects of speech and understanding and of humans on humans were well chosen and well written. In short, I'm glad I stuck with it, and I have a lot to think about.
The first half of the novel begins with the middle of the story, backtracks to the beginning, and then catches you up. That catchup, where you know it's all leading, takes forever, and the timeline loops all over the place, and there's a wonderful aside about having people over to your house whose children destroy your things and whose shits destroy your toilet, but mostly, it's a tangle of backstory that doesn't shed enough light on the situation at hand but does introduce you to important ideas and vignettes that are important later on. They're there, so they must be important, it's just hard to remember to see that when you feel like you're at sea.
Then, halfway through, you get sucked toward the falls. The plot catches up, the theory and the metaphor and the themes start to make more sense, and it all become oddly satisfying. I'm still not going to claim to get it all, but I do get parts of it. I thought the tie-in to Judaism (not real Judaism, I think, but a metaphorical, future underground religion based on it) was really interesting. I thought the effects of speech and understanding and of humans on humans were well chosen and well written. In short, I'm glad I stuck with it, and I have a lot to think about.