From the first paragraph, this is a startlingly original novel. The content slaps you across the face immediately and demands that you wake up and pay attention because this is not a derivative story and you're going to have to concentrate to understand what's going on.



Fine. 

Original.

Demanding.

Great, if it makes itself worth the effort, which, at first, it seemed to.

Then Liz Jensen decided to gild the lily by messing about with punctuation.

What is wrong with normal quotation marks?

I find that they do useful things like telling me when someone is talking and helping me separate that out from the authorial voice or the narrator's interior voice. True, the grammar rules can be a little complicated but that's because they're situationally specific and some of those situations are quite complicated.

Liz Jensen has chosen to dump quotation marks. Unlike some authors, she hasn't simply left them out and decided that to adopt an interactive modality that requires the reader to figure out what the writer would have written if they'd bothered to write. She's come up with an alternative set of punctuation. Here's a sample:

Finally, John groans through the music. – You know what that means, for me, he says. – Not necessarily, I go. I’m feeling jittery, ragged, claustrophobic, a bit sick. For once, I’m grateful for the musical racket dinning through the sound system. – You’d have been notified, I say. As firmly as I can. Has Fishook called you to the bridge yet? I can’t see John’s face from here, but I guess he’s just staring moochily out of the porthole at this point. – Well, has he? I say. No. – No, John echoes. – Well then, I tell him. Hang on to that, is my advice.

I've read it over several times and it seems to me that notation being used adds nothing but unnecessary effort for the reader.



Why do writers do this?

Perhaps I'm just getting old and set in my ways but this was just one challenge too many. One more obstacle to comprehension that I didn't need.

So I set the book aside. I'll wait for the movie to come out. Or maybe the graphic novel. .

On the artificial island of Atlantica, politics has been replaced by consumerism, with the Libertycare computer running every aspect of life on the island. One of Atlantica's main sources of prosperity is its willingness to receive the world's garbage, no matter how toxic, and store it in the porous rock on which the island stands, and another is the prison ships that circle the world picking up new inmates and occasionally stopping off in Atlantica for a 'Final Adjustment'.

The islanders are now known as customers rather than citizens and despite the mantra that the customer is always right, anyone who rocks the boat is 'questionnaired', and customers denounce their friends, relations and neighbours for infractions via the 'customer help-line'. At the start of the book, they are voting on whether Libertycare should run the island for a second term, and a campaign is underway in the USA to have Libertycare replace the president and government. But could what has been so successful on a small island really be scaled up for a country the size of the United States, and are things actually running as smoothly on Atlantica as Libertycare would have you believe? Why exactly are there so many Atlantican geologists being held in solitary confinement on the prison ships?

The Paper Eater is a dystopian satire on rampant consumerism, the power of big business, man-made ecological disaster, and the ability of human beings to stick their heads in the sand and ignore all signs of trouble ahead. ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2010/02/201014-paper-eater-liz-jensen.html ( )