Alex Foster

Alex Foster’s Circular Motion begins with a brilliant premise that promises quiet devastation of the world—a creeping increase in the speed at which the Earth spins, which if unchecked will destroy everything. The cause is the new pod system that allows global travel and the single company that controls it, wants to hide the truth about contracting day length. This is fertile ground for a novel about institutional inertia and the human decisions that enable and promote it. At its best, show more the book delivers flashes of brilliance and imagination. But those moments are intermittent, and the novel struggles to sustain their impact. The excitement is drowned by mundanity.

A large part of the problem lies with its central perspective. Tanner, who occupies much of the narrative space, is an oddly weightless presence. He provides a view of the unfolding crisis, yet he rarely sharpens or complicates what we see. He just gets on with his own trivial life, or if he does react to events that demand a stronger moral or intellectual engagement, he does so rather limply. The result is a curious flattening effect: scenes that should build tension instead lose momentum as they pass through him. Some key scenes are entirely flat and their significance is lost. Winnie is more distinct, but she too feels constrained by the novel’s design. Her actions and decisions sometimes appear as representatives of a protest movement rather than as the natural actions of a young girl. Both figures function less as drivers of the story than as conduits for it, and that limits the emotional and dramatic range of the narrative. With such dull central characters, an exciting and intriguing concept is nullified. By the time the planet is spinning so fast that a day lasts 3 hours, the narrative focuses on Tanner’s relationship break-up.

The figures at the heart of the problem, people like Bickle and Grant make cameo appearances and almost always seen through the lens of Tanner. Where they enter the story, the novel hints at a story of compromise, self-justification, and competing pressures. These characters remain frustratingly distant and sketchy. This distance also affects the book’s allegorical dimension. The parallels to climate change — the slow accumulation of warning signs, the role of vested interests, the fatal consequences of delaying action are clear enough, too obvious in fact and rather ineffectual.

Circular Motion doesn’t fail entirely. Foster writes with restraint and has a great and engaging central concept to drive it. Often pace was lost. There are long sections with no dialogue at all. Huge paragraphs of explanatory or descriptive text didn’t move the story forward. There were elements introduced for no apparent reason, which again stole momentum, such as the typo that resulted in Winnie’s family having to live with Wwlliams as their surname. The whole Tanner-Miguel relationship was largely irrelevant.

As it stands, Circular Motion is an intriguing but uneven work. Readable but rather disappointing. show less

3.25 stars

This was a good book for personal development as one of my 2017 goals is to write a book. However, I realized that I am just not ready to go full force into a book just yet after reading this. My key takeaways were: that you make time to work on your book every single day, you pick one topic and break it up into many books, and you use a pen name for each genre that you write in to up your sales and your credibility.

The author provided sample word counts for non-fiction and fiction show more books, and I realized that in writing my blog posts before editing, I am in fact very close to being able to write a non-fiction book, however that is not what I want.

Summary: good book, quick read, great advice. show less