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1. A first-rate writer.
   This guy isn’t everyone’s cuppa, but if you like his style and approach nobody does it better.

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2. Artsy-Smartsy
   There’s something about Powers’ “Plowing the Dark” that is both richly compelling and emotionally distant. Like geniuses of all eras, Powers can’t help but keep his patrons at arm’s length, if for no other reason than because his sumptuous prose lacks enough inlets for interpretation. This is, without a doubt, a brilliant book. But is it good?It could be argued that I’m simply not smart enough to get how good it really is, and I wouldn’t debate that. I will say I’m smart enough to see what a luxuriant virtuoso the man is. The story interweaves via rich, vertiginous artistry the plight of a group of virtual reality engineers in Seattle with the much more serious plight of an American hostage in the war-torn Middle East. Powers’ writing is uncannily lustrous, lending even the most innocuous of subjects (crayons or potted plants) a drenching layer of curious import, and making out of the truly menacing (beatings, kidnappings, ambiguous political upheavals) something clean and transient.Although I liked “Plowing the Dark,” I’ll readily admit I didn’t fully get the whole thing, either. For the first time since my heady college days I found myself re-reading and re-reading entire passages in a book, simply because the meaning was too tightly sown to penetrate. I could see Powers’ forest just fine (it’s hard not to), but I never got a clear picture of some of its trees. There’s really not much to the heart of the book, and Powers understandably spends only a few (slightly sentimental) moments dissecting that heart. The real interest here is in the rest of the story’s body, the fibrous nerves, the semi-solids of its life force, the ingrown hairs, crooked scars, and open pores of every character and nuance surrounding its steadily beating core.As such, much of the book feels a bit repetitive, and even unnecessary. “Ah, but when has art ever been necessary?” asks Powers, over and over again. And each time, it seems like he has a different answer. Since over half of the book concerns an artist (Adie Klarpol) who is working with some nerdy technoids on the VR room, the book has a lot to say on the function of art, but the truest (most potent) answer comes at the conclusion of the work, the final moments of the hostage’s story, the novel’s denoument a depiction of one of the simplest and most profound kinds of art.In spite of Powers’ elegance and the book’s beauty, the whole thing is a bit long-winded. And although I applaud his effort to spin together the two contrasting storylines, I also have to say it doesn’t really work. At its most crucial moment, when Adie Klarpol and the hostage find their life lines intersecting, Powers becomes his most obtuse. Perhaps he was simply worried that the almost magical realism of the moment might not jive with either the digitally fabricated realism of the one story or the painfully true realism of the other. In any case, the moment doesn’t work, and its failure is as evident in the nuts and bolts of the plot as it is in the breezy and incomprehensible writing used to describe it.Even with this kind of error soiling the story, the book is still an amazing read, a tribute to the time-tested struggle of imagination versus concrete experience. Just as Adie and company string their ones and zeros into an approximation of man’s ugliest worlds and most gorgeous fantasies, so does Powers string together hopes and despairs into something that is amazing to read, even if it’s not nearly as easy to understand.

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3. Too much work for the reader
   Two distinct unrelated stories in this book. The second one should have been a different book. The first one forces the reader to work too hard to get at what could be a more interesting and accessible story. Excessive word use. As an editor I would have cut about half of them, excessive descriptions, excessive wandering off subject, obscure references attempt to shame a less well read reader. The endings offer no closure.The writer has talent, but needs more self control of his keyboard fingers and a better editor.

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4. One of the best books I have ever read
   One of the best books I have ever read. It’s about the intersection of Art, Reality and Computer Programming, amazingly..

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5. Miraculous
   I don’t know if I can ever explain this book well.It was hard to read but I couldn’t put it down. I thought I knew the characters but then there were others. Sometimes I could picture the setting and other times it was more alien than any at novel.Many have said Richard Powers is brilliant that doesn’t seem to be a good enough description of his writing.Thank you for writing this.

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6. Five Stars
   Superb. Powers use of language is hypnotic.

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7. Not his best
   Maybe it will eventually be engaging. I won’t find out..

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8. Blinkered intelligence
   Mr.Powers possesses grand ambition. He chooses to write about large and potentially profound topics. In this novel he gestures towards the potential use and abuse of the human imagination – the image he chooses is that of a blank white room, suggesting the interior of a human skull along with the proverbial bare page confronting a budding author. In one strand of the novel, this room is filled with borrowed art and other worldly concerns, imaginatively re-invented through recent computer technology. In the other strand, an isolated mind first covers the walls with memories, focused upon a former lover, and later partly disintegrates through lack of contact with the outside world. Salient to each situation is the idea of how much effort should be devoted to representing the world, and how much to living in it – while not a simple moralist, Powers seems to be warning against representation divorced from any heed to social and political realities, be these personal or global; that is to say, he at least complicates the notion of art for art’s sake. The danger of becoming obsessed with the image, and forgetting the reality, is explored through the ultimate use made of the beauty of the virtual room, and through references to religions’, particularly Islam’s, prohibitions on representation. Powers also seems to be making a plea that we all need each other, for in high-tech Seattle, a team of people must work together in order to succeed, while in the hostage’s cell in Lebanon, a mind atrophies when denied company.*At the end of the book, Powers acknowledges a debt to the memoirs of Western hostages held in Lebanon. His research certainly gives realism to this part of the story. He also uses literary techniques favoured by bestselling authors, such as Stephen King, to grasp the readers’ attention. Thus, the protagonist, Taimur Martin, is quickly placed in jeopardy, he experiences pain and humiliation, and the entire tale relies on the tension in waiting for his potential release or escape. In a sense, this is all legitimate and engaging storytelling, but it does have a cliched and manipulative aspect. The depiction of the suffering mind is partly convincing, but pales when compared to, say, Solzhenitsyn, or Primo Levi (very high standards, admittedly). A weakness is also revealed in Power’s ability to create characters – Taimur’s thinks and converses with his captors much like he does with his remembered lover and, what is more, much like the way Adie and Steve and the all others in Seattle deal with each other. Prime among the conversational strategies of all these characters is a recourse to weak humour – weak puns, irony, and benign sarcasm – in Seattle this is merely annoying, but in the context of horrible depravation in Lebanon it is distracting, unconvincing, and inappropriate.*The Seattle strand of the book makes up its bulk – around three quarters of its pages. It is structured as a quest. This exact same structure is used by Powers in ‘The Gold Bug Variations’ and in ‘Galatea 2.2’. Again, it is a proven way to co-opt a reader’s interest, but in this novel the mechanism is obvious, and the quest itself of questionable appeal – consequently it feels rather crude. There are a large number of characters – they are differentiated by quirks and mannerisms, yet in conversation they blend, in part due to the failed humour mentioned previously, and also due to the relentless parading of references to works of art, literature, and music. This parade is especially galling as there seems to be an implicit thesis that in order to be part of the club of ‘intelligent’, ‘interesting’ people, one must be familiar with a canon of ‘great works’ – the works chosen are very conservative, as in other of Powers’ books, and can not legitimately be said to be simply alerting the reader to the existence of works otherwise unknown. Another shared characteristic, both within this novel and across Powers’ other books, is the attitude taken towards, and the depiction of, love. Every character adopts a nostalgic stance to love. Love largely occurs in the past; love is passive and motivates few actions; when love does bear consequences, as in the birth of a child, then this is rendered in a perfunctory, almost abstract way. It is as if Powers’ wants love to be important, but is unskilled in actually embodying it living within his story. His characters are emotional adolescents. The core of this problem lies in his refusal to address the darker currents in human nature. If his characters have sins, then they are ones of omission. Malice, hate, true envy, jealousy, are not genuinely present; consequently his characters ‘do’ very little to each other. If they are reprehensible, it is for their lack of constancy or lack of passion. They are bland and, at the very least, half empty. Powers is never going to create a Macbeth, or a Hamlet, or an Iago. You might think that those holding and abusing Taimur in Lebanon embody darker forces, but they are hardly characters, being inarticulate and skeletal, and so their malice is not embodied but abstract.*Powers’ language deserves special comment. I am baffled by those who call it poetic or beautiful. To me, it is ungainly, approximating the abbreviated rhythms heard in technical gatherings, conferences, or in recent journalism. It reads more like an introductory paragraph in ‘New Scientist’ or in ‘Wired’ than a poem. There is a laziness to his insistence of adding an extra clause, or several, when a single, well-crafted one would be far more potent and graceful (to some extent Don Delillo shares this failing, and he too is revered by some for his style). For beauty in prose I would turn to John Hawkes, or Samuel Beckett, or Denis Johnson.*Overall, it is hard to recommend this book. Powers has strengths, and these are probably best showcased in ‘The Gold Bug Variations’. He has glaring deficiencies too. I doubt he will overcome them, since his writing, in its detail and in its overall structure, has not progressed from that novel to this. To read him is to come into contact with an ‘encyclopedic’ mind, as widely said, but, for mine, it is a mind in many ways immature.

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9. Read a novel that is dense and difficult to understand and one could easily rationalise any lack of understanding by calling it a novel of ideas. As a result of this over use of the concept, notions of the novel of ideas have fast become a cliché. However, because of the issues raised in the novel, Richard Powers’ Plowing the Dark is nothing less than a novel of ideas, perhaps one could even take a step further and call the book a novel of abstract ideas.Take a bunch of geek-like characters, place them in an IT company, TeraSys, in Silicon Valley, give them the funding to work on a virtual reality project – called the Cavern, have as author of a story underpinning this mix, Richard Powers and immediately you would realise that you are in for a mesmerising, intellectual journey. To make things even more interesting imagine having a parallel story with a kidnapped character, Taimur Martin, incarcerated in a dungeon thousand of miles away from the setting of the main story and you could be forgiven for broaching the novel with trepidation. Powers have two protagonists for the two stories and they are effectively trying to escape from former lives. Taimur is escaping from a defunct relationship, and Adie Klarpol is escaping a New York where she had experienced “bumping into a groper … with each of his hands cupping one of her defenceless breast”. Furthermore, lodged in among the two narratives are miniature portraits of a range characters working on the Cavern project. In brief, a number of characters come together to build a virtual reality chamber called the Cavern. The conceptual starting point of the Cavern is drawn from Henri Rousseau’s painting The Dream.Mr Powers has taken the age old saying: art imitating life and reversed it. In Plowing The Dark what we have is life imitating art. Powers does this by using the painting Rousseau’s Dream to allow his main character Adie Klarpol to use IT to create a virtual garden of Eden from the painting. In one scene, Powers tells us that Adie: “stepped into this dream, recalling herself to things long forgotten, the way one remembered one’s body after a sustained illness”. In another scene Adie takes, “a friend, Stevie on a tour. They slowed in front of a couple, knotted together under the vines”.One of Powers purpose in this novel of ideas is to explore the role of the artist in society, the purpose of art, if any, and the ethical boundaries beyond which the artist should not thread. Following a discussion between two characters about a photograph of someone who appeared to have committed suicide by jumping from a window, Powers questions whether it was appropriate to take the photograph. He comments on one of the characters moral disgust about the technique and subject matter that produced the photograph. “Adie could only stare. Stare at the ungodly, omnipotent technique. Stare at the obscene subject matter, painted here as if it were the heart of tranquil eternity”. The same theme occurs in the story of Taimur Martin, kidnapped somewhere in Beiruit. As Taimur crave for books to stimulate in mind, one of his down trodden kidnappers tells him: “In this world, books are not even a luxury. They are an obscene irrelevance”.Another idea that Powers explores in the novel is the relationship between reality and the imagination. The story alludes to and perhaps draws upon Plato’s cave analogy. Indeed it provides a connection between the two stories. By having the action of one story played out in a virtual reality setting and the other in a dungeon, Powers asks us to consider how in new and extreme situations we would deal with what is real and how we would draw on our imagination to anchor us in the reality of our situation.The novel’s narrative is highly intertextual; it proceeds by means of references and allusion to other works of art and significant cultural events. Along with a style that was vague and esoteric, the intertextual narrative made for a difficult read. Plowing The Dark is a novel that I could only take in small doses. It demands high levels of concentration, it requires the reader to bring some knowledge of high art to the reading, and the reader must be able to grasp at least some of the narrative allusions in order to understand and appreciate it.I found neither of the stories gripping but what kept me engaged was a sort of intellectual exercise in trying to work out the ideas Powers were exploring. If you like reading the novel of ideas then you will find Plowing The Dark very interesting. If you are looking for a gripping story with character development and a familiar setting then you will be disappointed. I struggled about whether to award 3 or 4 stars to the novel but decided to give it 4 stars because as a work of artistic imagination and creation the novel is perhaps second to none.

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