A while ago, I asked for recommendations of books. I asked people to tell me what their favourite book is. Several people named Ready Player One by Ernest Cline which conceptually I liked the idea of, so it was one of the first recommendations that I read around 5 months ago. It has been turned into a film by Steven Spielberg which has just been released and so I have been thinking about the book again.
Now, I may be a grumpy old man. I may not just get what kids like these days. However, this book is not something I enjoyed, and there are a few reasons for this. I know from reading reviews on Goodreads that there are others who feel the same way. I also know that there are those who absolutely adored it. I don’t like or want to ruin stuff for anyone, so I’m not going to tear it to complete shreds like I would have done if I had written this immediately after reading the book.
The film might be significantly better than the book, I don’t know. I’d imagine it will be as it’s Spielberg. I don’t intend to watch it. You may enjoy the film, the book or both but I feel that I need to get out my thoughts on why I didn’t enjoy it. This will probably contain spoilers, although it is my opinion that the book could not be spoiled more than Cline has already done so by misusing the intriguing concept he came up with.
The first thing that annoyed me about the book was that it is a mystery book where the reader has no chance of solving the mystery. I love detective stories. I love trying to solve the mystery but always coming up short because the criminal or the detective or both is/are much smarter than I am. This is fine, and it is all part of the enjoyment. The mysteries in Ready Player One cannot be solved by the reader. There are no clues which will allow you to do so. Even if your knowledge of 80’s culture is as good as Wade, the main character, you stand literally no chance of solving the puzzle. When he (or one of the other characters) works out the next step, it comes completely out of the blue.
For a novel where the main premise is solving a series of mysteries, all the suspense got drained for me because I knew it would be something entirely random. This is partly because it is set in a virtual reality world called the Oasis and we have absolutely no idea what is in it unless the author tells us about it. He doesn’t drop any clues about how to solve each mystery. The planet which the protagonist needs to travel to in order to solve the puzzle has not been presented to us, so we have no idea it exists and therefore no idea what the solution could possibly be.
Another thing that annoyed me is that it is a sci-fi novel, although rather than inventing its own universe, it appropriates it from the 1980s. It is basically nostalgia porn. It plays on the fact that people who love that culture will love references to it in the book. Which they do, but it doesn’t mean there’s any substance there at all. It doesn’t add any meaning, depth or insight to the novel. It annoyed me in the same way that all the references to celebrities in Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis annoyed me, so much so that I was unable to read another of his novels for several years.
The book also has a love story, but I never cared if the characters get together or not. Lots of other factors might have combined to create this apathy in me. I might not have cared because I was struggling to get invested due to the other elements of the book that turned me off. However, it seems to me that there is minimal depth of character or character development. The characters don’t have much internal conflict. They have their goal of solving the puzzle and by and large they are focused on it to the detriment of everything else, except when Wade becomes a love-struck teenager. I could not give a hoot if they got together, or even if they died horribly. I struggled to have any empathy for the characters at all.
I feel that this is a story where fairly early on you know what is going to happen and there are few surprises and relatively little of interest. There’s effectively a deus ex machina in the fact that Wade knows literally everything. Some of the puzzles require photographic memory and knowledge of the most obscure things. He twice quotes a film near perfectly in order to solve a puzzle. I have seen some of my favourite films hundreds of times and couldn’t even quote 50% of one of them. How he knows two random films back to front stretches believability.
I haven’t even started to pick apart the quality of the writing and as it’s been a while since I read it and I have no desire to look at it again, I don’t want to criticise this aspect without feeling confident in what I’m talking about, suffice to say that it didn’t feel like it was written well.
I loved the idea of the book. A futuristic virtual world, obsessed with the past as the modern world has fallen apart. Clinging onto some hope of a better time and a better place. I wanted to like the book – I absolutely love dystopian novels but I really struggled with Ready Player One. I feel the execution of the concept really let it down.