Woken Furies: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel (Takeshi Kovacs Novels) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Takeshi Kovacs steht wieder im Mittelpunkt einer actiongeladenen und gewalttätigen Geschichte. Tak versucht immer noch seine Vergangenheit zu verarbeiten und sein Leben in Ordnung zu bringen, während er von einer brenzligen Situation in die andere stolpert. Wie von Richard Morgan gewohnt, erwartet uns eine temporeiche und packende Story. Allerdings erinnert Aufbau und Entwicklung etwas an die vorhergehenden "Kovacs-Bücher" - ein kleiner Wehrmutstropfen. Rein aus "Vergleichsgründen" zu diesen Büchern, hätte Woken Furies wohl nur 3 Sterne verdient. Doch es gibt zwei Dinge die mir besonders gefallen haben und einen zusätzlichen Stern rechtfertigen:

1. Die politischen Zustände auf Harlan's World werden, nach etlichen Andeutungen in den früheren Büchern, zum ersten Mal im Detail beschrieben. Man erfährt mehr über Quellcrist Falconer und ihren Kampf für Freiheit und Gleichstellung der Menschen auf Harlan's World. (Und gegen Schluss gibt es noch eine Überraschung).
2. Die "Marsmenschen" treten langsam aus dem Reich der Legenden hervor. Ich möchte hier nicht zu viel verraten, aber anhand der Andeutungen in Woken Furies können wir doch sicher sein, dass ein weiteres Buch folgen wird, welches sich eingehender mit den mysteriösen Marsbewohnern befassen wird.

Woken Furies ist ein spannendes Buch, dessen Storybau etwas zu sehr seinen Vorgängern ähnelt, das jedoch die eine oder andere Überraschung für den Leser bereithält. Wer Morgans Stil mag, darf beruhigt zugreifen. Es ist auch nicht schlimm, wenn man die Vorgänger nicht gelesen hat, da die Bücher nicht so stark aufeinander aufbauen wie es z.B. bei Alaistir Reynolds der Fall ist.

Takeshi Kovacs is an ex-secret agent. He drifts. Does that from one planet to another. In this 3rd book, he's found happiness. And love. And it's taken away from him, leaving him adrift, killing priests one after another for revenge. Then suddenly, his big hero, the ueber anarchist, Quel Falconer seems to be back. Well... She could be back. But what if it's not her?

It's a 3rd Takeshi (and there really, really, really should be more). It's the same old Takeshi, but more bitter. More reclusive. More distant. And closer than ever before to solving the riddle of the Martians. But he doesn't know.

After reading Altered Carbon (from here on let's call it "AC") and Broken Angels ("BA"), and having read so many positive reviews on amazon, I ordered Woken Furies ("WF"), too. AC was not quite a revelation, but I liked it - especially the Kovacs character. BA was quite another thing. It didn't feel like an utter waste of time and money, but all the positive qualities of AC went slightly downhill in that second Kovacs book. All in all, I think I wouldn't buy it again, and I gave my reasons in a detailed amazon review. Still, three points out of five.

And now Woken Furies. Whatever went wrong in in BA, here the author really blew it big time. WF reads like a cheap rip-off of AC and BA, only that it was the original author who wrote a bad copy of his own books. A first-rate ghost writer might have done a better job.

In terms of genre writing, WF is kind of a cross-over between SF and a military spec ops thriller, just like BA. Crime and the mob are part of the story, Kovacs does some reconnaissance work, but it's light years away from being anything like a detective story. Compared to AC, Kovacs as a character has now totally lost his edge. The slick and cool detective has gone, Kovacs starts out as a pathetic, embittered tragic-romantic hero on a desperate and psychotic murdering spree against those that wronged him. From there he's going astray into quite another thing, on no other grounds that he's got nothing better to do in that moment, and because some woman reminds him of his demised sweetie pie. At that point I should have stopped reading, really. But I didn't.

Like Kovacs, also the dialogues lose their cutting edge. One-liners, rest in peace. In BA, Morgan succeeded from time to time in creating fascinating moods and had one or the other interesting idea, but in this respect, WF is a total waste land. As for me, the only memorable scene in the whole book is in the middle when the deComs are "negotiating" with the machine life-forms they're about to kill. Great and funny as that is (in a sombre way), after a page Morgan drops it, and that's all. Obviously the author doesn't know how to make use of a good idea. At least not while writing WF! Or take the idea of Kovacs being hunted down by the "re-ensleevement" of his own younger self: open the book and watch this fascinating and most promising idea crumbling into dust under Morgan's very hands. He's totally unable to turn it even into a single interesting scene. I'm not telling too much when saying that it all ends up in a single, spectacular moment of anti-climax and disappointment. I needed to tell this because they're actually trying to sell "Woken Furies" on the strenght of that idea. So let it be known that Morgan's totally spoilt that one, too!

The plot progresses more or less arbitrarily and is overly inflated. I already mentioned that Kovacs seemingly starts the whole adventure out of sheer boredom, or because his killing spree got into the doldrums and he had to get a new "sleeve", or because of some romantic reminiscence ... Usually there is no compelling reason for one step of the plot developping out of the other. The plot consists of three strands (I'm not telling anything here that you aren't given on the first pages or that isn't hinted at in the rear flap text): 1) Kovacs' romantic-psychotic vendetta; 2) his love interest's mind being inhabited by someone else; and 3) the powers that be taking interest in "someone else" and producing another incarnation of Kovacs, pirated from a younger version, to hunt them down. Most of the plot is somehow being prodded forward by (2) and (3), and that's the best you can say: "somehow being prodded forward", without end, just to fill the pages, I suppose. To inflate the book up to 500 pages so that a certain segment of readers gets more "immersion value" for their money. I'm quite positive that the whole thing could have been written as a kind of short novel with no more than 150 pages. And that could have been some book!

There's no added value in lengthening the book, especially from a literary point of view: The places Kovacs goes to have no faces, no moods, they leave no impressions. Anyway, he is constantly hurrying from one place on Harlan's World to the next. In terms of places, there's no focus here, no resting point, and don't tell me that it serves to create a mood of breathlessness and being on the run. It doesn't. It's just one bloody bore after the other. After some time all those places feel the same and exchangeable, and you have to force yourself not to start speed-reading their descriptions when Kovacs reaches still somewhere else.

Back to the plot: it remains inconclusive for most of those 500 pages, and it could have gone on like that for a thousand more if Morgan hadn't cut short at the publisher's page limit and invoked - I'm taking a deep breath now - the Deus ex machina on the final pages to kill it all off. He does it even two times in short succession, ... but I don't want to spoil the story for those who still want to read it. My point is just to show how corrupted the story-telling is. And on the second time, now that REALLY is a Deus ex machina, text-book style: the big, bad, mother-... DEM! It is so blatant, and so stupidly implausible! On those last pages you can really see Morgan sweating and toiling to remind us of all the obscure hints that he had left in the previous 500 pages for the reader to notice and guess (if he/she was just bright enough...). I wonder if he first wrote the whole story, then killed it off by DEM, and then went back in his text file and interspersed all those obscure hints ex post, like, one line every ten or twenty pages. How to explain the point? Let me give an example: It's like reading a whodunit, and in the end the murderer was the gardener. No, that's not like it. In Morgan's story, it was the gardener's nephew's other uncle. We saw that guy, like, once on page 107 walking on the street /and making a face/. Now in Morgan's book, Kovacs would recall this situation on page 513 thanks to his incredible Envoy powers of recall (Morgan even explains it like that!), and we are given to read (in italics): [line break] "he was walking on the street" [line break] "making a face". Go on with all the other meaningless "hints" in italics and with line breaks, go on like that for another one or two pages given as Kovacs' inner monologue, and in the end we're supposed to accept that it wasn't the big, bad DEM, but an obvious and utterly logical conclusion to the whole story after all - case settled.

But it doesn't work that way. Even for trashy SF, that is. Just. Too. Stupid.

The characters. There is not a single one among them that you bloody come to care about. Even Kovacs himself, I'm not sure whether I cared about him in any way. They are all flat, all two-dimensionial, while Kovacs himself is just a shadow of the guy he was in Altered Carbon. That Nadia- or Quellcrist-character had some potential, but Morgan chose to limit her to three or four short conversations with Kovacs. I liked her much better in AC and BA, because there she was a fascinating sort of motif, an expression of Kovacs' subversive side. In WF, the author uses her to give blow jobs to Kovacs. May go down well for her, but not for the book. Same with Virginia Vidaura who used to be a kind of mother figure and role model for Kovacs in AC and BA, where she figured just as a reminiscence, as another expression of Kovacs' interior. Morgan's giving a coming-of-age angle to what happens in WF, but well ... no way that this would work as literature. At least not for me.

Sex scenes in WF: trashy, needless and utterly unimaginative. Every single one. I already ranted about that in my amazon review of Broken Angels, and what I wrote there could also be said here, to the last letter. Whenever Kovacs meets another member of the female sex, chances are good they'll suck and savour each other's bodily fluids a couple of pages later. What in the world does Morgan have in mind when he's concocting that trash? My theory is that he is doing that for (what he imagines as) a target audience, like ... sexually extremely undernourished young males? Those scenes being devoid of any other merit, I'd be at a loss for another explanation. By the way, in Morgan's books they've always more or less the same ways of doing it, so maybe Morgan is always taking the same sex scene and just re-wording, re-constructing it. I think that even for those who really, really need to read (and use) that stuff, it's gonna be very boring after scene no. two ...

And finally I'm summing up another rant from my BA review, also true for this book: Morgan's literary device of breaking up sentences with full stops. Well, still. Works not. Neither here. Please make use of triple-dots. When people are stopping. To think. And neither do you use full-stops. To emphasize! Might have been a nice idea to give flavour to a particular character, but if everyone in the novel talks like that, it becomes such a pain to read. Dear author! Please find other ways to make your books look like real literature. Thanks.

To sum it all up: Woken Furies. Don't waste your money on that bore. Just don't!