Book review: The Night's Dawn trilogy

In a very far and advanced future the spirits of the dead find a way to come back and possess the living.

This saga has been heralded by many as a masterpiece worth of a place alongside the seminal scifi works of such luminaries as Clarke or Banks. Personally I think that even admitting that these books have a lot of interesting concepts as a whole this is far too long.

We are talking about approximately 4000 divided in three doorstopper books. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to write good books with this length, George Martin does it routinely, but it’s a very hard thing to do and in this case you could have easily excised more than half from each book without losing anything important.

Stuff takes literally forever to happen. We aren’t even introduced to the main menace at the beginning; we have to wait a full third of the book before it happens. The saga is filled to the brim with a plethora of secondary characters, most of them missing real motivations or interesting personalities.

Entire plot lines of questionable interest go around forever before being abruptly dropped.

There are some interesting concepts, like Edenism or the voidhawks, and here we get to another problem. Hamilton introduces everything in medias res, this can be ok for normal narrative but here we are talking about the hardest of hard scifi, very complicated stuff that requires at least a couple of pages of explanations to wrap our head around. Instead we are presented to these things as they happen and we have to slog through pages and pages of incomprehensible jargon with only a vague idea of what’s happening and why.

Having said that I must also admit that the world created by Hamilton is extremely original. A lot of interesting stuff is hidden behind those walls of text and if you manage to get there it is certainly a very interesting place.

The core concept of the novel is the clash between this advanced future, with all his hard scifi stuff, and the forces of the undead. This makes these novels very peculiar. Alongside all the technical jargon a lot of extremely graphic and violent stuff happens. Suffice to say that there is Satanism in the future, a lot of Satanism and so, if you are somewhat weaker in the stomach, I suggest you go back to more ordinate places.

The ending, without spoiling it, doesn’t work at all and doesn’t manage to resolve properly the main plot thread. The overall impression is that Hamilton overreached himself.

Conclusion: A grandiose but in the end mediocre saga. Not really worth the immense effort to digest it.