Before I get to my review, I’m going to start by politely suggesting that if you haven’t already read the author’s article about the key elements of this novel HERE, please do so.
I’ll wait.
The reason for me pointing this article out is that the author actually mentions a couple of points that I had already made in my notes before writing this review. (Yes, I know that me making notes may surprise some of you.)
So – yes, The Fold is a book that takes old SF tropes, and further yes, the book is pleasingly old-fashioned SF, to my mind the sort that Isaac Asimov or Alfred Bester would have been proud of, albeit with contemporary touches. It’s the type of tale that uses sf-nal ideas that wouldn’t really surprise anyone but then does something of its own with them.
In essence, The Fold is a book that centres around solving an SF mystery – there’s something that doesn’t seem right and our hero has to try and make sense of it all.
Enter Leland Erikson – ‘Mike’ to those that know him. (The reason for that name change is explained in the book, should you accept the challenge….) ‘Mike’ is the book’s Elijah Bailey (see Asimov’s Caves of Steel), though strictly speaking he’s not an ‘official’ detective. Rather, he’s a lifelong friend of someone important (Reggie) who’s called in a favour. Mike has special talents – namely an eidetic memory which means that he forgets nothing. This can be both a blessing and a curse, though it is invaluable when investigating matters. Combined with Mike’s high IQ this gives him a knack of being able to make patterns, to makes sense out of chaos.
The structure of the book is also classic mystery whodunit. The first part of the book introduces us to Mike, then Mike to our range of DARPA scientist-suspects at the novel’s version of the Hadron Collider, the amusingly named ‘Albuquerque Door’*. To make things interesting, there’s a few geeks and more than enough personality quirks amongst them, enough to keep the reader guessing whether these are genuine oddballs or alternatively more covert attempts to disguise what is really going on. As our hero collects information, through conversations and reading documents, he assimilates the information into ‘something’ from which he can make a conclusion. (Remember, there’s a big secret, something that’s just ‘not right’ that Mike has to determine for his friend whether the secret is a national security risk or not.) The author has a great analogy of red and black ants – one representing memory, the other emotions – in Mike’s brain, assembling patterns in his head until Mike makes sense of it all.
And then about halfway through, there’s a major incident and then a consequential plot revelation that turns everything on its head. Like the best of such matters, the signs are obvious if you’ve been reading carefully up to that point. It’s where the reader goes “I KNEW that’s what was going on!” even when they may not have.
Whereas up to this point the book has been almost police-procedural, it is at this mid-point that things start to get more SF-nally interesting. For what the research team think is happening when people step through the Door… isn’t. This therefore becomes a problem, and as the range of the Door widens could be an increasingly major one. The Door needs shutting down, but the problem is that the Door won’t shut down…
I really don’t want to say more without giving away big parts of the plot. However, I will say that things definitely move on apace and that events become messier, scarier and more complex. The ending is appropriately well written enough to give a degree of closure to the novel, though there is some setting up for another book, should the author wish to go that way.
In the end my overriding impression is a positive one. What endears the plot to the reader is the naturalistic way our team of geeks work and respond to each other and deal with crisis upon crisis. The characters are both, by turns, annoying and engagingly natural. The dialogue is peppered with contemporary cultural references – Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Katy Perry, Angry Birds, social media and the like (as well as a few expletives, it must also be said), and this creates a rather realistic tone to the events. It seems that what happens is possible.
It also helps that to balance the banter there’s a lot of discussion and dialogue which seems scientifically appropriate, too. Whilst at time this edges a little towards info-dumping, on balance it is done rather well and manages to maintain the balance between exposition and plot development.
Whilst things do become a little overheated towards the conclusion, the action sequences are on the whole very well done and keep the pages turning. In the end the reader feels that what has happened is acceptable, though there are aspects that may need further clarification in other books.
In summary, The Fold is a pleasantly engaging novel that tells its tale well and uses old tropes to good effect. A surprise, but generally in a good way.
The Fold: A Novel by Peter Clines
Published by Random House, June 2015
ISBN: 978-0553418293
386 pages
Review by Mark Yon, June 2014.
*For those who know their Warner Bros cartoons, this may be a reference you recognise.
