Its richness and quirkiness captivated me and, as someone who can find novels a chore (in particular unconvincing first-parson narratives), I genuinely found it hard to put down. Such reservations aside, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Overlaid on a relatively slight plot, the whole at times feels too disparate to hold together. This sometimes suggests too much breadth and too little depth. He maps social as well as geological strata and explores tensions between art and science, creationism and evolution. She turns out to have imaginatively documented the life of one of her husband's ancestors, an early female geologist – here presented as a story-within-a-story which parallels the lives of both Dr Clair and TS.Īlong the way, Larsen ropes in Darwin and quantum theory, religion and feminism. TS clearly takes after his mother who, we discover, is not as paralyzingly empirical as she seems. The uniting themes of family and heredity arise from TS's ill-matched parents: his father a taciturn cowboy his mother, Dr Clair, an obsessive entomologist.
There is no doubting its scope and ambition, akin to TS's own 'lifelong task of mapping the real world in its entirety'. However, author Reif Larsen has transcended the sum of such influences to produce an engrossing and original novel. There are even hints of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time in TS's slightly autistic behaviour, and something Harry Potter-ish about a benign, possibly supernatural secret society which takes Sparrow under its wing. In American novels from To Kill a Mockingbird to Catcher in the Rye, an unreliable child narrator (TS is a compulsive liar) has exposed the hypocrisies of the adult world. The obsessive noting of detail and the digressive footnotes were reminiscent of Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine. Along with his footnotes and digressions, they attempt to impose order upon a chaotic, confusing, complex world.Įlements of the book reminded me of other novels. TS recounts his epic trek across America with the aid of many diagrams scattered around the margins of this book. When the Smithsonian Institution, unaware of his age, calls to say that his illustrations have won a prize, he packs a suitcase, hops a freight train and sets off alone for Washington DC. TS maps everything – from his sister's movements when shucking corn, to the facial expressions of adults, to the gunshot that accidentally killed his brother the previous year. He lives on his parents' ranch in remote rural Montana and makes maps. A dizzyingly diverse, ambitious work which nevertheless remains accessible and engrossing. Summary: A child prodigy sets out across America, mapping his world and his journey in minute detail.
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