Liz Moore - The Unseen World

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very good

I thought Liz Moore's Heft was quite brilliant.  The Unseen World is also very good and shares Heft's qualities of insight, humanity and compassion, but I did have some reservations about it.

The Unseen World is a novel about identity.  It is the story of Ada Sibelius whom we first meet aged twelve in the early 1980s.  She is a very intelligent young woman whose father David is raising her alone almost in isolation and home-schooling her, including at the Boston computing lab of which he is the head.  Here they are working ELIXIR, an early project in artificial intelligence.  When David's mental faculties begin to fail this life breaks down, Ada has to join the world and mysteries about her and David's backgrounds begin to appear.  There is some very thoughtful investigation of what constitutes a human identity, with a neat background of developing artificial intelligence which quietly points at similar issues.

There is much here that is very good.  Liz Moore writes very well in an unfussy, readable style and her characters are believable and very human.  There's some neat, unemphasised juxtaposition between David's loss of mental capability and ELIXIR's slowly developing ability to seem conscious.  Moore has plainly researched the topics she deals with in depth so the book is credible and I became very involved with Ada's story, some parts of which were beautifully and poignantly done.

I did feel that the book was a bit too long and could have done with a little tightening up in places; there was rather too much of Ada's adjustment to and relationship with her peer group at school, for example, and the book lost some focus as a result.  Also, it is told in a timescale which moves between Ada as a child and as an adult which seemed an unnecessary distraction to me and might have been better as a linear narrative. 

However, these small flaws are more than compensated for by Moore's insights into character, her humanity and compassion, all of which shine through here.  This may not be as exceptionally good as Heft, but it is a thoughtful, intelligent and very involving read which I can recommend.