I’m always leery of these “widescreen” novels with so many characters and subplots going on at once. It’s hard enough to pull off in less than 300 pages, but novels are already so self-indulgent these days (seriously, what the hell ever happened to editors?) that anything longer than 400 is already struggling to convince me to bother with it.

Philip K. Dick pulls off the widescreen novel beautifully in about 250 pages with “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” It’s a shining example that authors setting out to do the same thing should be required by law to read beforehand.

That diversion aside, I’ve read Lanchester’s LRB articles and he’s one of the very few writers I’ve encountered who actually get it from my perspective. He understands the City, which few writers do (I should read Alex Preston in that light, as an ex-trader gone the literary rather than thriller route I have high hopes, plus I’ve met him and he’s a nice chap).

At about halfway through the review I found myself getting slightly fatigued, and that’s not a criticism, because I read it as telling me something about the book. Some books have so much going on one can’t help but write a lot, but in doing so one reveals what may be an issue with the book (and here is) – that there’s just too much going on.

Widescreen necessarily tends to imply breadth over depth, but there does come a point of diminishing returns. This goes on the firm maybe pile for me. It’s Lanchester and he knows his stuff, I quite enjoy this sort of novel and I am a Londoner, but being right now stuck in a novel that’s longer and has more elements than I absolutely care for I’m a little gunshy. Teju Cole is calling, and I finally succumbed and bought A Sense of an Ending which I’m hoping will be an effective palate cleanser once I finish my current ill-judged sf novel (ill-judged because it was the wrong time to read it, not through inherent fault of its own).