The Secret Library: Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

[Kris Johnson]

Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan has been selected as the second tome for The Secret Library. From the cover blurb and the Amazon.com review, I would describe the book as Wall Street meets The Road Warrior. It's a violent world where high-stakes finance and road rage collide, and fortunes are made by backing the right war. Discuss it here or over at our official GoodReads group.

[Ed Dale]

I particularly enjoyed the development of the main character. We enter the story with him in the middle of a transformation, from pretending to be something to actually being what he pretends to be. By the end of the book, he has to pick what he will be. It is hard to call it "good" or "evil". Other words could be "effective" or "ineffective", "rich" or "middle class" or even "decent human being" or "total shit".

In a similar way, society changes, significantly, between the begining of the book and the end of the book. You get glimeses of this being mainly US and UK, while the rest of the EU looks on in horror. This change could be called removing hypocracy, or you could call it the corsening of society. It depends on which side you are looking at, or where your own interests lie.

All of this happens against the back drop of a enjoyable read filled with action and gore. I could see this being a great movie, if they can keep some of the character development and change, while distracting us with fast cars and violence.

I really look forward to everyone elses take on this. Am I over intellectualizing a fairly simple book? I could not interest my wife in it, but she doesn't tend to read books about cars. Cars and the car culture form such a key to the books that I was not sure she would read past them.

[Greg Howley]

I should probably read this. I absolutely loved his Takeski Kovacs trilogy, although the second volume wasn't nearly as good as the third, and very little I've ever read was as good as the first. Uhm... did that make sense?

[LolaJ]

A few thoughts for the discussion:

I enjoyed the book overall. It is very different from anything I have ever read. Truthfully, were it not for The Secret Library, I would most likely never have heard of this novel -- it is not something I would ever pick up on my own. (That's one of the greatest advantages of a book club -- the probability you will be exposed to an author or genre, etc., that you would otherwise pass on, if not actively avoid!)

Frankly, I thought the writing was fairly average -- this is not carefully, artfully crafted prose. (It ain't Faulkner -- pun intended.) And the dialogue drove me crazy with all those periods in the middle of sentences -- ostensibly to indicate verbal pauses, I guess? That. Was. Very. Distracting. In my writing and most of what I've read ellipses are used to show pauses. Maybe the periods are a peculiarity of British publishing style? I don't know, but it bugged me. Unfortunately, it's the kind of goofy distraction that can pull me as a reader right out of the story. (Or maybe it's just my past life as a copyeditor.)

Having said all that, I realize that the engine of the novel is characterization and plot. There's too much going on in the plot to call this a "character-driven" story, and at the same time many of the characters are too flat (even stereotypical -- especially the female characters) that they seem secondary to the plot. To me, the most interesting characters are Chris Faulkner, Jack Notley, and Vicente Barranco. Chris is simply the most developed character -- as most protagonists tend to be, especially when the story is told predominantly from their POV. Jack and Vicente are strong secondary characters -- both of whom seem more complex and even ambiguous as the plot progresses. They both have an interesting "backstory" that we get glimpses of, but overall we don't really know what to expect of them. How will they figure in as the plot plays itself out like the symbolic chess game the author unfortunately rubs our noses in? (Way overused symbol -- I got it the first time.) My least favorite characters were Liz Linshaw, Nick Makin, Louise Hewitt, and Erik Nyquist. I'll save you a dissertation on my reasons -- basically, they were plot devices, not characters. I must wax poetic about Erik Nyquist, Carla's father. His foremost function in the novel, apparently, is to open his mouth and spew the anticapitalist philosophy the author wants to comment on. I found that very cheap technique. Sorry.

So, you ask, what did I like about this book? I thought the action sequences were vivid and original. I agree that this would make an interesting film. At times I could sense the remnants of the screenplay it once was. (Unfortunately, I also felt those parts where the author was working hard to stretch it into a novel. I don't think this really needed to be 464 pages.) The atmosphere and setting came through pretty well for the most part. I liked the strange jargon and dialects used by the inhabitants of the zones, phrases such as "zek tiv," etc.

Finally, I also appreciated that this novel -- its faults notwithstanding -- allowed me to ponder my own beliefs and assumptions about modern society, greed, investment capitalism, war, love, sex, cars, etc. I am left deciding that Chris Faulkner is simply a tragedy -- not a tragic hero. He casts aside his best self (devotion, loyalty, conscience) to embrace his lowest self (lust, greed, selfishness). One might argue that he has to do so to triumph over his circumstances. One might just be right. That's the tragedy.