Harare Review of Books

210 pp. Published May 22 by Deixis Press. SF.

Jezz and Jeff are the same guy living through two completely different experiences: one is in the present, kind of watching his life fall apart in slow motion; the other is a future soldier in a very chaotic world. It’s a novel that felt to me like an allegory about mental health: Maybe Jeff and Jezz are two manifestations of a person with dissociative identity disorder? I like that idea.

It’s great that Kinsley tackles such big concepts, but this one didn’t really work for me, for the following reasons:

• The smoking. Gosh. There is a crazy amount of smoking in this novel… And it’s not just that I hate it when characters smoke (although I do), but it felt like either a repetitive writing tic or, if I’m being somewhat generous, a crutch that maybe meant to be shorthand for something. I bet if those references were removed, Kinsley could have saved at least ten pages, or possibly more. And because I know how blind an author often gets to this kind of thing, I feel an editor should have picked it up. If it was deliberate—and maybe it was, to show Jeff/Jezz’s deterioration—it didn’t come across clearly enough for me.
• I really couldn’t connect with either Jezz or Jeff (mostly Jeff), although I became quite intrigued with Jezz’s world. I’m a bit iffy about where that’s set and why—China—because I’m not completely sure if it adds anything to the narrative. There were references to troops from other places, but mostly in negative ways—again, not sure why unless it was xenophobia on the part of the MCs. In other words, could be a cool idea, but we can’t know because it wasn’t fleshed out. So—
• I know it’s not the done thing to review the novel that wasn’t, but: I wonder if this novel could have benefitted from a lot more time and most of the focus on building Jezz’s world, with a reveal much later that it’s possible Jeff is hallucinating and/or dissociating. In other words, a much fuller exploration of that future war and all of the things it’s doing to Jezz. I know that as things stand, it’s hard to know whose reality is real—Jezz’s or Jeff’s—and that’s a hook, but I think Kinsley could have strengthened the writing on the more interesting “reality” without losing that feeling of unbalancing the reader.

So, an interesting read with some cool subtext, but I wanted more.

Thanks to Deixis Press and NetGalley for DRC access.