Genesis - Bernard Beckett

I'm a sucker for a well-packaged book.  It is very important to me how a book looks, how it feels, how much weight it carries in my hand.  The tactile experiences of reading play a terribly important role in a journey through a book or novel - more often than not, I'll leave off reading a poorly packaged volume before I'm even finished with it.  I can't help it.  It's just the way I role, reading-wise.

Genesis, then, a novel by Bernard Beckett, is an appealing product from the outset: a small, slim hardbacked volume, no more than 150 pages and entirely unpretentious.  The cover art is incredibly compelling - I must have spent a combined ten minutes staring at the front cover alone.  I generally don't care for hardbacks, but Genesis is neither bulky nor weighty, and opened beautifully from the first page.  It was, in a word, excellent airplane reading.

Genesis has been sitting on my shelf for the last month, since I took a break from reading to begin studying for the LSAT.  I nabbed it off an Amazon Best-Of reading list because the blurb grabbed my interest; by the time I got around to reading it yesterday, however, I had forgotten whatever the blurb said that interested me.  I came to Genesis with little idea of what I was getting into (per the usual, I didn't read the flaps before beginning). 

It's a novel of rigid structure, spanning the four hours and three intermediate breaks of a student's oral examination for entrance into the Academy.  Throughout the student's recitation of her subject of expertise (an important figure in her society's formation), we learn bits and pieces of the recent past, as well as the manner in which the contemporary society came into being.  Though initially such a tight structure - involving, primarily, the Examiners' questions and the student's answers - might seem incredibly limiting, Beckett pushes it in unexpected ways, splicing the examination dialogue with bits of long narrative storytelling (on the part of the student), some carefully controlled flashback, and well-constructed scenes of the past, shown by hologram in the examination room.  This surprising flexibility keeps the structure from becoming tedious, and it enables the story to gather speed quickly.  Before we know it, we're engrossed in highly philosophic conversations between two historical figures and rushing towards an end that, as it unfolds, is in turns both satisfying and grotesque.

It's an excellent, quick, engrossing novel.  Beckett exhibits excellent control over both his story and his style, the latter of which is spare and ironic, mercifully free of the clumsiness that clutters so much sci fi writing.  It's not an entirely original concept, and the "surprise!" ending will not be such a surprise if you follow the writing closely, but the whole thing is so well-handled and so tightly executed that I found myself deeply impressed.

A suggestion: best read while listening to The Fountain's soundtrack.