I mentioned over a month ago that I was about to read a book entitled Jack Faust, which centres around a German legend with a similar name.

According to the Wikipedia entry, the Faust legend generally “… concerns the fate of a learned gentleman named Faust, who in his quest for forbidden or advanced knowledge of material things, summons the Devil (represented by Mephistopheles, often also referred as Mephisto), who offers to serve him for a period of time, at the cost of his soul.”

This particular take on the story centres around a 16th century Faust who no longer feels that things are the way that he’s been led to believe. The Solar System, religion, everything is not quite right. Mephistopheles (who states he’s an alien, which is never explored other than a few senteces at the start) appears and agrees to supply Faust with all the information he’ll ever need.

Faust begins to understand things like electricity, steam-power, lighting, botany, chemical production, advanced medicine and so on, and proceeds to bring them into the World of the 1500s. Later in the book, people are travelling in cars and trains, have electricity and the Spanish invasion of England around this time makes use of aircraft carrier-level industrialisation.

Though the story is a quite interesting one, and I won’t go into the finer points here, I found the book difficult to read — hence the reason I’ve been at it for over a month. I had to extend the loan of the book and force myself back into it a couple of times. I could tell the book was interesting enough that others would like it, but I just don’t think Swanwick’s style of writing agrees with me.

Next up is One of Us, by the same author as Only Forward which I thought was excellent (well, the first three quarters of it) so hopefully this one will turn out a little better.

As suggested to me by Trav, I picked up Only Forward from the local library and gave it a whirl.

Very briefly, the story revolves around a guy in the future who has to find someone who’s been kidnapped. The interesting thing about the city in which he lives is that it’s divided into “Neighbourhoods” (it’s spelled correctly, by the way; the author’s British). Each Neighbourhood is like a small, self-contained city focused on one specific thing. “Sound”, for instance, is completely devoid of sound; no one is allowed to make noise except for one hour a day. “Colour” has walls that change colour to compliment whatever gaudy outfit you’re wearing; again, it has an hour a day where everything’s black.

There is a major change to the story around halfway through the book when it begins to focus in the character’s adventures in “Jeamland” (a dream land) which I didn’t find as compelling as the first half — I kept wanting the story to switch back to the city, which I found more engaging.

The way in which the story is told is great, however. It’s told as if you were sitting at a bar with the guy telling you the story in a casual manner.

Ultimately, I found the big switch to be a bit of a letdown. I think there was probably enough ideas, imagination and storytelling that it could have been two separate novels. In the end, I still enjoyed it but can only think of what may have been.

Next up is Jack Faust, which is based on the German Faust tale; there are a lot of works based on Faust and this one sounds interesting. I also have One of Us up next, which is by the same author as Only Forward.