[Read the full review here by Richard Nye, The Richmond Magazine. Excerpts below.]
Call this a thriller if you really must. Art, like pathogens and contagious creeds, tempts us all to classify, catalogue and explain. But to bill The Pattern Maker – debut novel of Richmond author Nicholas Lim – as pure thriller is like describing the Ode to Joy as catchy, or The Aeneid as a ripping good yarn.
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Beware this book: its relentless chill can infect the most cherished corners of the soul. Loss of comfort is everywhere: in the fractured lives of the protagonists, the easy familiarity of death, the curiously sick landscapes and flickering lights. Around every corner lurks Larkin – alluded to in the dialogue, but an implied presence right throughout the book, as questions of ultimate meaning in the face of futility peer cautiously through the dystopian fog.
Beware, but read anyway. The Pattern Maker is a tour de force of research and startling erudition slung over a tense, plot-driven frame. Here the complexities of microbiology, information technology and Eastern mysticism mingle with a basic desire: to discover who did what and why.
It is not an instant fit. At times, the scholarship and reflection weigh too heavily on the action; at others, the plot seems an irrelevant intrusion into matters both painful and profound. For a while the book seems top-heavy, as though the sheer weight of its themes might cause it to implode, crushing the unfolding events. In the end, however, thought and action combine to form a lethal compound, and for the last 100 pages the tale gallops to its gripping conclusion.
When the dust settles, the questions remain. At the heart of this book is the stand-off between revelation and reason; between spiritual enlightenment and the secular Enlightenment of the West. In which should one trust? And what happens if the power of science and the certainties of faith are conjoined?
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This is the vertiginous place to which Christine Garrett comes. But in getting her there, through passages as moving as any you’ll read this year, the author endows his work with a peculiarly bleak beauty, like the falling light of a winter sun.
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