4 out of 5

Gah, so close.  Reamde was Stephenson’s celebrated “return” to traditional plotting, before his wanderings into the intense inner workings of The Baroque Cycle and, I suppose, the complete speculativeness of Anathem.  But it’s still not a return to cyberpunk, really, it’s more like a meeting of the new verbose Neal with the traditional thriller writer Stephen Bury (the pseudonym who wrote under with his Uncle).  There are some interesting elements introduced in Reamde, and they get the full Stephenson fleshing out at moments, but otherwise we’re really just following the beats of a normal fiction bestseller, albeit one written by a guy who knows how to wield a heavy pen.  But what does elevate this above throwaway, before it devolves into an extended chase scene that – though a lot of reviews amp this up as a great climax – to me, felt like chunks and chunks of filler to give padding to one final shootout, and what makes this unique to Stephenson, is how far away we start from our finish point.  There’s really no way, from the outset – even from the back description – that you could pick out how we get from point A to point B, and god bless the man, it really feels like it makes sense while you’re reading it.

Basically, we have a World of Warcraft clone called T’Rain that is run / was created by one of our lead characters – Richard Forthrast.  This is a world that admits to the existence of Warcraft, the spin here being that Richard’s goal was to create a useful and continually updating model of the MMORPG, so he ropes in the best minds in fiction and science and finance to tie all the best fantasy elements to the game along with a real world gold-mining aspect that, unlike Warcraft, is totally praised as a viable way to make money and live life inside / outside the game.  We can revel in the detail Stephenson puts into the game’s genesis and development, a lot of his tech knowledge and, probably, experience / research either with gaming or with the gaming culture or both that spins the ins and outs of this business into something legitimate that we want to read.  Also a welcome change is Neal ditching the whole “love saves the day” aspect that dumbed down characters in his other books.  While Richard goes through an emotional ordeal during the course of the novel that makes him question his involvement with the world, he is nonetheless a total high-functioning loner, and Stephenson pretty much makes no bones about saying “and that’s just how it’s gonna be.”  I love that our model of the “and everyone for someone” relationship has slowly been changing as we grow more insular with computer culture, and it’s great to see people like Neal willing to put that into his books, whether or not he believes in it.

So we’re dealing with computers, we’re dealing with cool nerds – rub your hands together for some nerdy fiction.  Only… no.  The machinations begin with a virus called Reamde, which is an in-game virus that corrupts personal files… the players responsible for the virus will hold your de-scrambled files hostage unless you deliver x amount of game gold to such and such location.  In some plotting genius, this is really just the jumping off point… for the Forthrast clan (brothers, and cousins) to get caught up in a globe-hopping mob and terrorist and CIA mess.  Explaining any details would really ruin the WTFness of it all.  And though, from afar, this momentum is awesome, once you realize you’re getting more and more into traditional fiction territory, your reading pace slows down a bit.  And Neal is no stranger to running several lead characters at once, but he builds up Richard and then pretty much leaves him alone for the whole middle portion of the book, switching gears to a character that, frankly, I wasn’t expecting to be with for quite as long as we are.  This character’s plight is equally interesting, it just seems distracting… like you don’t realize it’s going to be the main thrust of the narrative until the pages have already passed.  And derailment within derailment, there’s a momentum to events that slows down when things turn into a more static hostage situation, while Neal shuffles pieces (returning to Richard’s point of view, in part) to get our players back together.

It’s all very patiently written and given the space to play out, and it’s actually surprisingly bereft of the 200-page furniture erotica sidestories that have been in most of Neal’s long books, but it also feels like Reamde is only 1,000 pages because he kept finding a way to make it 1,000 pages, if that follows.  It really doesn’t feel like filler, these are all interesting sequences, and I’m not an editor of such skill to say what could’ve been taken out without sacrificing the reality written into the book, but all the same, I feel like there was a shorter novel here.

I loved Anathem, but it had its failings.  Reamde doesn’t really have any failings, but besides bearing the Stephenson name and bearing a touch of genius in terms of its plot flow, it is absolutely the most traditional book in his whole line, and should appeal to any fiction reader willing to heft around the page length.