I picked one of my unread novels off a shelf yesterday and decided to start reading it. It was Ninety East Ridge by Stephen Reilly. I just felt like devouring something new and this was it. It’s around 500 pages long and I’m already two-thirds of the way through it. Reilly is actually the brother of Matthew Reilly, who is a more well-known writer. The book is mildly interesting, about an advanced installation that gets built on the Indian Ocean and the political and social ramifications that spring from it. I was interested in it for its investigation of those ramifications, but Reilly’s ultimately a conservative and gives us a very watered down version of ‘Utopia’. He doesn’t even have the guts to call his new society, which features perfect equality and a money-less economy, Socialism. Instead he has a character call it something like ‘voluntary Capitalism’. The story’s main thrust is the characters and their interpersonal concerns, which are not deeply sketched; but the political implications and attendant skullduggery kept me reading. It’s an okay book, and I will finish it, but I had hoped for something better.
I finished the book. It’s a little disappointing how, basically, the bad guys win. Spoiler alert: the installation/island gets blown up by them. I guess for a lot of people a Socialist utopia in the middle of the Indian Ocean is just too much to accept.