The blurb is as follows:
Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's calorie representative in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, he combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs long thought to be extinct. There he meets the Windup Girl - the beautiful and enigmatic Emiko - now abandoned to the slums. She is one of the New People, bred to suit the whims of the rich. Engineered as slaves, soldiers and toys, they are the new underclass in a chilling near future where oil has run out, calorie companies dominate nations and bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.
And as Lake becomes increasingly obsessed with Emiko, conspiracies breed in the heat and political tensions threaten to spiral out of control. Businessmen and ministry officials, wealthy foreigners and landless refugees all have their own agendas. But no one anticipates the devastating influence of the Windup Girl.
I stumbled upon this book in Waterstones, with "The Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel." emblazoned across it's cover. I picked it up with high expectations, and after having read it, have to say that those expectations weren't entirely fulfilled.
The Windup Girl is a deeply complex book, set it in a dystopic Thailand where all sorts of machinations are going on. It does many things right - the world building is absolutely fantastic, and you can tell that Bacigalupi has done his research as the prose is crammed to the brim with bits of detail which really throw his vision of Thailand into sharp relief.
I am in awe of how immersed he makes the reader feel without burdening our minds with unnecessary technical detail - this is a Sci Fi with a focus on the characters after all, and not the scientific magickery which makes the world in which they live tick. This is not an easy task, given that there are mountains of technical detail which could have been delved into had he desired; how do kink-springs work? How does all the genehacking and generipping work? It's left as food for the imagination.
Another thing I ended up loving about the book is it's use of the present tense. I was initially skeptical, not having read too many books with such a narration and it felt a little odd. However, as I sank into the story, I realised that as a technique to deliver the story with, it lends an immediacy to the proceedings, which when coupled with his fantastic poetic use of language, makes the book an absolute treat to read.
So, what turned me off?
Well, for the most part, this book feels like an extended "slice of life" prose. It just didn't feel like it was going anywhere for the first half. The characters, whilst well defined and memorable in their own right, play around in the lovely sandbox world that Bacigalupi has created, and whilst this is entertaining to read, it seems for the most part the plot is missing a sense of purpose and only slowly gathers its wits as the story comes to a climax.
I think this is due to several factors - the complexity, for one. Having such an ensemble of characters to manipulate in the story inevitably leaves some of them under-developed and I definitely feel that some of the relationships between the characters should have been explored more deeply. In the end I found that although the visceral action scenes had great impact, I didn't for the most part feel emotionally connected to any of the character strands; with the exception of the Kanya/Jaidee subplot, which was quite well done. Instead, I made my way through the book rather like an impartial third-party observer. Whilst this was interesting in it's own right, sort of like people-watching, it's not the sort of experience I read books for.
Perhaps there is a case to be made here for making characters too grey.
To conclude, I feel that had Bacigalupi handled his characters with as much finesse as the world, this story could have been an absolute scorcher. As it is, I am left feeling a little cold, although the world will stay in my mind for some time to come.
On my once before used scale of ten, I give this book a 7.
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