The past and present was fun, the future was not

Pulled up the Amazon page for this book and realized it’s by the same author as Manhattan Beach and stuff makes a lot more sense now. It’s an interesting story that falls apart about halfway through and you finish it just for the sake of finishing it. The idea is more fun than the execution. Also immediately after I read this one, I read a book also tangentially about music, so I may get my wires crossed in places.

The book is largely about the people behind music. Our main characters are mostly a producer and his assistant, framed at different points in their lives. The people in their lives also get a little fleshed out, a few chapters of their own, and it starts to reconnect a little Love, Actually-esque towards the end which can be done well but here it is not. Unfortunately not a single one of the characters was really what we might call sympathetic and at no point along the way did I really care about anything that might happen to any of them.

And then it gets worse because Egan projects their lives into some nebulous point in the future (gonna say at least a decade out?) and invents something that feels like an alternate reality with no explanations about why things are the way they are. Generally I like being tossed in the deep end and being asked to figure out what’s happening, but not for what amounts to a sliver of the book when the author has zero intention of making anything clear.

I’m 95% sure this is my 52nd review and marks my first ever completed Cannonball and I’m a little sad it had to be this book.