hard boiled altered carbon

I 'finished' Altered Carbon just in time for the dystopian meeting in the pub. I'd opened the kindle and read the first dozen or so pages thinking, 'wow!'

Then something changed.

I did hesitate slightly with the first person account, which was styled on Raymond Chandler noir, although by comparison Philip Marlowe has light and shade. Underneath Marlowe's wisecracking, hard-drinking, tough private eye, there's contemplation and enjoyment of chess and poetry. Marlowe isn't afraid to risk physical harm but doesn't dish out violence merely to settle scores.

That's all very different in Richard (K) Morgan's writing. Our Private Investigator Takeshi Kovacs has no such Marlowe personality traits. In fact, I'm not sure that he has any personality at all.

Kovacs has come out of jail, where he was locked away for a sentence of 200 years. Don't worry, only his cortical memory stack was imprisoned and he was re-sleeved into a new body when he was bought out of his sentence by a Very Rich Person (Bancroft). New bodied as an ex-Envoy (marine-like super fighter) he's now wired on neurochems, enzymes and hormones to make him ultra-tough.

This is in the opening sequence and really quite interesting. But I'm already getting a hint of the anti-character mapping of our man. We don't get anything of his mixed race Asian/Eastern European roots. He lives entirely in the moment. Apply a stimulus and get a response. I understand the process. It's like designing one of those shoot-em-up games. All about the gratification. Forget Apps, Remember Gpps. Gratification Per Page.

Ryker's mission is to solve the murder of Bancroft, who has rebooted himself into a new body, using a backup clone of his own cortical stack. Bancroft is an ultra-rich Meth (Methusalah) who has been through countless body re-boots and is probably north of 350 years old. He can afford to live in a castle in the sky, surrounded by exotica.

Bancroft wants to know how he got murdered, because the police have put it down to suicide. It's Kovacs/Ryker's job to investigate the case, in return for a freedom bought by Bancroft. Yes, it's that Bruce Willis/Vin Diesel dilemma - go back to jail or help solve this crime.

Still an okay set-up. But remember we are also inside the head of Kovacs/Ryker. It's really too unpleasant in there. Both oozy and ferocious. He was longwindedly feral in his instincts. I use the door test as a quick example. In Kovak's world no-one could ever stand by the door.

Instead of "she stood by the door", we'd get, "Taut body framed glistening in the doorway, her breasts lithely straining from the skintight leopard print." Okay, I made that up, but it gives an impression of author Morgan's writing style.

On the other hand, if it's a man by the door, then it follows the Raymond Chandler line: "send a man with a gun through the door" - oh yes, that happens on about every second page.

So after the world and quest set up, the rest of the narrative turns into a first person shooter game, with funfair style pop-up baddies interspersed with eye-candy females. The gratification per page formula continues for so many pages that at one point I just skipped 150 of them, to be sure of finishing the novel before pub-time.

My skip came just after one of the torture scenes, when Kovacs was flipped into a woman's body (to be tortured) and then flipped back into Ryker's afterwards - Highly questionable - This would not pass Alison Bechdel's test.

The body switch back also needs to be added to the list of evil overlord No-Nos. "Never give an angry Envoy-level fighter back their original body." It could go near Nr. 4 Shooting is not too good for my enemies.

I did land back in the story with enough pages left to see the quest's plot deliver, although I didn't feel that I'd missed much in my needlecast jump to the future.

The book also has an epilogue. I assumed it would be a hook to volume two but, intriguingly, it seemed to have some reflection as well. Somehow, by now, this marginally more soulful section didn't ring true and felt like a bolted on patch to the smashing plate stack of the novel.