The World of Null-A
★★★★★
As this is a 1940s book, it’s only fair to make allowances - this is regarded as a classic of its time. A golden age novel is going to have some very dated science (atomic flashlights!), and like many stories of the time, this is one about a hero who overcomes all odds with his superior intelligence, vanquishing mercilessly the inferior henchmen and aliens who stand in his way.
There’s a promising start with a city-wide suspension of policing while ‘the games’ are on (sounds familiar), but this plot is quickly dropped, and by halfway, we have been introduced to a handful of characters, and I’m seriously confused as to what’s going on. Our hero seems to alternate being caught and escaping every chapter. Meanwhile, who’s on what side, and even what those sides are, seems to be a fluid concept. Each capture seems to be an excuse for our cast of characters to troop in to deliver some confusing exposition, triggering me to repeatedly scan back through the book to try and get things straight, before one of them helps our hero escape.
The prose is as clunky as you would expect from this age, with lots of philosophical pontificating, internal monologuing, and over-analysis - the execution falls far short of say a novel like Dune. In my head, the prose sounds like one of those classic black-and-white postwar news archives, quintessentially British but quite hard to digest nowadays.
Core to the plot is the titular Null-A, which is never properly explained; it is just a plot device which allows our hero to presumptively science-the-shit out of the situation with his innate cleverness. As a backup, in the future every room has a convenient lie detector to hand in case the plot needs to be moved along. Sigh. The Null-A cult just wasn’t needed - its only contribution was to make our hero seem smug and superior.
If it wasn’t 200 pages I would have DNFd. Instead, I gave it the benefit of the doubt, waiting for a flash of brilliance from the crazy, but it never arrived. The novel ground to a halt with a rather obvious reveal, and I was left with the feeling that it was all a bit pointless.
