Patrick Ness - More Than This

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Exciting, gripping and thoughtful

I thought this was an excellent book - exciting, engrossing, extremely readable and full of interesting ideas and thoughtful reflections.

It is hard to give a flavour of the plot without giving too much away, but the opening of the book is "Here is the boy, drowning." And he does drown, quite irrevocably, and it's brilliantly and chillingly described. And he then wakes up somewhere unknown...but not quite unknown. One of the very well-handled themes of the plot is not knowing what is real and what is made up in one's head (including a powerful modern restatement of Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum"). There are echoes of The Matrix, Total Recall and the like, but Ness also subverts the genre very successfully and this book has a good deal more moral and human substance than most works in this vein. It explores themes of sexuality, families, guilt and friendship without once becoming turgid or preachy and Ness keeps up the pace, the shocks, the mystery and the thrills throughout. He's a terrific storyteller and I was completely hooked.

After his, to me, disappointing The Crane Wife, Patrick Ness has returned to a genre in which he seems much more at home and this is far more reminiscent of the quite brilliant Chaos Walking trilogy. It may not have quite the depth and power of Chaos Walking, but it is very, very good and very warmly recommended.

(If you haven't yet read Chaos Walking I recommend it very strongly, too - it really is something quite exceptional.)