Book Review: Unity

 

Image: The cover of the book is a blocked color illustration of an eyeball with a hexagon shaped pupil. It is white with a teal and yellow striped iris and dark blue pupil. Fading out from it are the colors dark teal to light to duller yellow to bright yellow. In circles around it in three layers part cut off at the edges of the book are cutouts of human stick fighures similar to paper dolls all holding hands around the center. There is a bright yellow stick figure in the center of the pupil. Across the top of the eye is the title of the book in bright yellow letters and across the bottom is the author's name: Elly Bangs.

 

One thing I can say for sure about Elly Bangs is that she is not short on creative and interesting ideas. Her first novel- Unity- is quite the showcase of these ideas. It is difficult to describe this book in a review without giving spoilers, but I am going to do my best. In the afterword of the book, Bangs tells us that she started Unity in high school 18 years ago and that the book kept evolving and transforming as her life did. I can see these kinds of themes throughout the book among the multiple, interconnecting elements. There were a lot of things in this book I had not seen or read before, or at least not in the way Bangs wrote them. There are cyberpunk, post apocalypse, dystopian, futurist, and many other science fiction subgenres that all meld together. This is a strength of the book. The story is interesting and full of twists and turns. Some of the bigger reveals towards the end are unique and multidimensional in ways that are engaging and entertaining. You can definitely see leftist political persuasions throughout (which I am all for, if that's not clear,) including diverging ways that certain leftist thoughts can become dangerous- particularly those that are authoritarian or pseudo-leftist power grabs.

Where I struggled with this book is that there were so many ideas that it sometimes felt as if none of them was fully fleshed out before the next was created. I can see how 18 years of different ideas ended up in the same book. It's not that all of the different things don't fit together- though there are times where I was left wondering why certain things survived apocalyptic collapse intact while others did not. It's more that I was often trying to figure out what was what up until the end. Since the book changes perspective between first person narratives of different characters to the occasional third person narrative, it is important that these characters be distinctive enough from each other. Their life experiences definitely are.  But, there were many times where I found myself asking, "wait, who is talking right now?" and flipping back a couple of pages. Now, this could be because I happened to read this book during one of the more tumultuous times in my personal life leading me to have a flawed attention span. But, I do think that also, I often found it hard to tell the narratives and internal dialogues of Danae, Naoto, and Alexei in particular apart. These are very different characters who all sound very similar during their personal narratives. We learn more about "Borrower" as the story goes on, and it fits into how his narrative sets itself apart a bit more. Many of these characters are referred to by completely different names at different times which makes their distinctiveness more important.

We also have multiple villain or villain factions (3-4 depending on your perspective) in the story, all of which seek to capture or connect with Danae. Each one has an interesting premise, but again often feels unfinished. We learn more about them as the story progresses but they still remain a bit shallow to me. I would have loved to see this book take on fewer ideas and expand on each one a lot more. Or, to create a series of books where all of the ideas get to remain and be built upon over time.

During the last stretch of the book where various villains intentions and worldviews are revealed, there are a lot of interesting explorations of uniformity, power, authority, misanthropy, technological progress vs detriment, and the all around messiness of what it is to be human. I liked that two of the bigger reveals involve characters that represent two sides of the same coin, but for different reasons (I know this is very vague, but I don't want to spoil the most interesting parts.) Learning why all of these people were seeking Danae and the technology contained within her was interesting. The epilogue, though, was not my favorite. There is a moment with Danae and Alexei who once again are doing very similar things despite being very different, and there is a message that the author clearly wants to convey- about allowing humans to be flawed- that I think is an excellent message to end the book with. The vehicle for this message was what I really did not like, and the way it played out was another way in which a shallowness permeated something that could have been further developed into something very interesting.

I think that Elly Bangs is overall a good writer with fantastic amounts of creativity and imagination. I would definitely be interested in reading her next novel. I think this is a good start and I also think she can give us a lot more.

This was also posted to my goodreads.