I usually avoid things labelled Masterworks, a kind of inverse snobbery I acquired from a boyfriend many years ago. He was terribly middle class and pretty much only read literature or Masterworks, and made me feel very stupid for not knowing about classical music (my parents listened to Radio 2, nothing with classical music on!) or indeed anything much.
Anyway, I’ve got over that now. Mostly. So I thought I would give Mockingbird (S.F. Masterworks)
a try, even though I’d never heard of the author. It’s taken me a while to read it, it’s not an unputdownable book by any stretch of the imagination, in fact, as it’s written in sections about different characters, it more or less lends itself to drawn out perusal.
It doesn’t suffer from a coming and going approach at all. There’s nothing difficult to remember from reading to reading, it’s more like having an undemanding friend who doesn’t really mind how long it is between your dropins for tea/ coffee. It’s a portrait of a dystopian future, where some ppl’s lives are so hopeless that they’d rather immolate themselves than go on living (usually in groups of three, and feeling no pain as drugs are free) with just a single lifelife in the person of a man who teaches himself to read. The hopelessness is hinted at rather than drawn in depth, although the breakdown of society is gone into in more detail.
I enjoyed it. It’s a gentle book, full of fleeting literary allusions, and narrated in a variety of voices, but unusually approachable despite the changes. I don’t know what makes a Masterwork, but this is the second book I’ve read recently flagged this way, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (Fantasy Masterworks)
being the first, and with these experiences in mind, I think I may be seeking out Masterworks in the future.
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