This series of novels makes new concepts in physics live in the imagination. Some of the characters come to life although the central character, the narrator, sometimes appears to be dense, impulsive, and unimaginative, presumably because her mind reflects the author’s judgment of the typical reader’s mind. For example, she dimly recalls that hydrogen is “dangerous.”
The writing itself, though flabby, has verve and occasional beauty, but the editing, if any, is wretched. For instance, Jones’s diction calls attention to itself. He avoids common verbs: People here do not rush. They very rarely run. Mostly they sprint, sometimes race, once dash, occasionally tear. The author does not realize that most common words can be repeated without raising an eyebrow, but repeating “sprint” makes one think of Harry Potter.
Jones, self-consciously modern, breaks schoolish rules like the stricture against using “like” as a conjunction. Even when he could easily reduce the word count by using “like” in its traditional role (“the Brimstone shook and rattled like a runaway freight train”), he goes out of his way to turn it into a conjunction: “the Brimstone shook and rattled like it was a runaway freight train.” He also loves to end sentences with weak words like prepositions (“toward the same building it had originally appeared from behind”). And forget worrying over “who” and “whom”; there are only three instances of “whom” in the entire novel.
Often his diction is downright wrong.
• He calls the purpose of a tool its “intention.”
• He thinks that an octave is a measure of loudness rather than of pitch.
• Apparently tired of “consists of,” he uses instead “comprise” (its opposite, i.e., include) and yet can’t fit it idiomatically into his sentence: “it comprises of a series of numbers.”
• Watch for “as such,” which according to Jones means simply “therefore.”
• “Instance” for “instant”
• He does not seem to know the words “differentiate” and “distinguish,” so he uses “discern” and lengthens the sentence to accommodate it: “The only thing to discern they were actually different was a couple of abandoned metal luggage carts.” Or else he uses “discriminate”: “There was nothing to discriminate this part of the mountain from any other part of it.”
• He is very confused about “lie” and “lay.” He uses the latter as both the present and the past of “lie,” and when he needs a past participle he uses “lain” improperly for “laid” (where Freuchen had lain the two women). Yet when he actually needs “lain,” he uses “lay” instead: “. . . who had, until now, still lay unconscious.” Verb conjugations are just too much for him or his proofreaders.
When two different idioms are available to say the same thing, Jones tries to combine them. Thus, “It was difficult to make out much detail” and “We could not make out much detail” are conflated: “It was difficult to make out too much detail.” And consider this classic redundancy: “The source of the radio signal is coming from there.” (The signal, not the source, was coming from there; a source is where things originate.)
His spelling is laughable:
• “Further into the opening were what looked like colossal milky-white pyramids, each as wide as a jetliner, they’re apexes pointing downward, forming a crystalline ceiling.”
• “my left bicep”
• “a peel of thunder crashed over us”
• “the ladder that lead up” (for “led”)
Some word groups lack significant words: “She slowed her pace to more of a fast jog, enough that Freuchen and I could keep up with ??” and “smaller pieces of concrete and broken red bricks which Albert dutifully followed behind Silas each time he took the stairs.” Other phrases make no sense whatever: “the translocation of almost so many humans.”
And finally, thanks to the author’s permitting initial apostrophes to be turned upside down as opening single quotation marks, few pages are free from trivial annoyances.