‘Ship Breaker’ – Paolo Bacigalupi ((Atom)

 

I was never very much good at keeping up with all the new releases here before the baby came along; the high profile ‘chunky stuff’ was never particularly conducive to reading during rush hour commuting after all. Since Hope’s been around though... Well, forget any chance of ever keeping up with the new releases; not when you’re dealing with a baby that insists on you wearing swimming goggles all the time (best joke ever, apparently) and views all books not being read to her as a threat to her position as number one most important thing in the house. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll get caught up sometime...

This is yet another very longwinded way of saying that I now must officially be the only person in the world who hasn’t read Paolo Bacigalupi’s multiple award winning novel ‘The Windup Girl’. It’s there on the pile but there’s no way it’s going to get read right now. If that wasn’t bad enough, the rest of Bacigalupi’s work had passed me by, over the last couple of years, so I couldn’t help but wonder just what I was missing out on.
The arrival of ‘Ship Breaker’ in the post (a few weeks ago) gave me the ideal chance to find out just what I’d been missing out on, if anything. Weighing in at just over three hundred pages, it looked like ideal commuter fodder and a great way to get a feel for Bacigalupi’s work without it being torn out of my hand by a rampaging toddler...
So, what have I been missing out on? I’m still not sure... I came away from ‘Ship Breaker’ feeling strangely non-plussed about the whole affair but feeling that if this book was anything to go by then ‘The Windup Girl’ could be worth my time. Confused? I was, at least to start off with...

Oil is scarce in this world of the near future and all the old oil tankers have pretty much been allowed to run aground so that they can be salvaged for spare parts to build the boats of the future. Nailer’s job is to strip copper wire from the innards of these tankers but he’s growing too big to fit into those small passageways and there’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to find work anywhere else. An uncertain future awaits Nailer and the only way to stave it off is through a ‘lucky strike’, the kind of salvage haul that comes by only once in a lifetime.
When a luxury clipper beaches during a violent storm, Nailer’s luck finally changes... or so he thinks. There is enough oil on board to guarantee Nailer’s future but the surviving passenger could very well get him killed...

‘Ship Breaker’ is one of those books that looks like it has everything a book needs in order for you to be able to sit down and enjoy it in one sitting. That’s what I thought when I started reading but found this wasn’t the case. As a result, ‘Ship Breaker’ falls short of being a truly engaging read but what Bacigalupi does give us was more than enough to make me think that I really need to finally pick up ‘The Windup Girl’...

‘Ship Breaker’ offers us a post-apocalyptic landscape where a mixture of ecological disaster and natural resources drying up have reduced a large chunk of humanity to scrabbling around and trying to salvage what they can from obsolete machinery. I’ll say right now that Bacigalupi’s commentary on what we’re doing to our environment is a little too heavy handed to feel like it’s part of the story. Bacigalupi perhaps his voice a little too strongly on the book at times... Bacigalupi’s world is still a world though where the rich can live in luxury and come up with genetic creations like the augmented ‘half men’ who act as bodyguards and soldiers. A world of sharp divides then that Bacigalupi uses to bring the focus squarely onto those who must scrabble in the dirt to survive. It’s a clever device that really hammers home how precarious Nailer’s existence is and when he has to the chance to go for something better you can’t blame him at all for doing it. The claustrophobic opening chapters, where Nailer must work within the bowels of an oil tanker, are a superb example of this and the book is full of moments like these. It’s a harsh world but gorgeously drawn and a lot of thought has obviously gone into it.

When Nailer’s quest for a better life takes him away from his coastal home though... that’s where things started to fall down for me. Bacigalupi has clearly gone to a lot of trouble to come up with a setting like this; using it as the backdrop for what is essentially a ‘chase story’ didn’t quite fit somehow. It really didn’t gel for me, the background setting hinted at something a little more thoughtful than the action scenes that we got. That’s not to say that Bacigalupi can’t write a decent action scene (he clearly can) and the plot had enough twists and turns to keep me reading. I guess I was after a smooth read and the use of two such contrasting elements meant that was never going to happen.

If that wasn’t enough, I found Nailer to be a character that I had real trouble engaging with. Basically, I read the book to see what happened at the end, not to see what happened to him (if you get my meaning).
The fairest thing to say here is that I’m not the ‘Young Adult’ audience that this book is aimed at. The target audience will probably get a lot more out Nailer’s character than I did. Personally, I have trouble dealing with any teenage character that attaches the same level of importance to their own adolescent feelings as they do to the prospect of being torn apart by augmented dog men. Get away from the dog man first, then work out if you’re going to make a move on the potential love interest...
I did feel for Nailer, and what he was going through, but I couldn’t help but think that perhaps Bacigalupi could have handled his character a little more effectively...

‘Ship Breaker’ is a bit of a mixed bag then but the world building is superb, enough so that I’ll put my misgivings to one side and give ‘The Windup Girl’ a go at some point. I’ll be hoping for better things though...

Seven and a Half out of Ten