Newly out in paperback, Robin Sloan’s love letter to both print and digital media, which began life as a 6,000-word ebook, ultimately fails to live up to its promise. Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore starts strongly enough, with Clay Jannon, a jobless everyman, taking a job in the titular San Francisco-based establishment and discovering strange goings-on amongst the tall, dusty shelves. The idea of a hapless hero stumbling upon dark and ancient mysteries hiding in plain sight is very Neil Gaiman, and indeed the nicely atmospheric tone of the story’s opening is particularly reminiscent of the Sandman scribe’s work. But by the time the book’s epilogue rolls into view, there’s an overwhelming sense of an opportunity missed.
Sloan’s problem is that the mysteries he sets up are unravelled far too easily (apart from the book’s central puzzle), and there are too many contrivances underpinning key plot points. As he investigates ancient codes, hidden cyphers and secret societies, Clay always seems either to have access to a friend or acquaintance with precisely the right skill-set for the job at hand, or to simply stumble across a solution before a few pages have elapsed. Very little drama is generated by the story, and the simplistic, gung-ho spirit of adventure which pervades the book (as well as all the main characters’ devil-may-care attitudes) makes it feel as though Sloan had designs to write a young adult novel, albeit one with an all-adult cast. Hinting at deeper and more arcane mysteries lends the story a genuinely intriguing element, but one which is quickly squandered through a series of swift and disappointing revelations. A good part of the story involves Google (too good a part, actually), and the people who work for them, and it’s difficult to tell whether Sloan is trying to subtly satirise the ever-expanding community of ‘techies’ who now call San Francisco home. Certainly he sketches Google’s Silicon Valley campus as a dreadlock’d, gluten-free beacon of optimism and progress, but there’s an emptiness behind the technological bluster, represented best by the character of Kat, which actually makes the techies’ thirst for knowledge seem unpleasantly desperate.
Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore is not a bad book by any means, but it is a disappointing one. Whilst proving an enjoyable and quite uplifting tale, the story also affects an illusion of depth which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The opening pages will make you believe that you’re in for an adventure full of hidden clues and typographical puzzles, but by the end Sloan’s attempts to draw together disparate story elements to create plot twists feel undercooked and tiresome. A fun read, then, but one which doesn’t live up to its potential.
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