The Swarm

"The Abyss" meets "The Thing" in this sprawling, exhaustively researched eco-thriller which balances interesting characters and tense plot twists with long pedantic lectures on everything from evolution and theology to deep sea mechanics, personal identity, and biology...and does so in a way that is both informative and hugely entertaining. Despite a few translation glitches (it's spelled "wasn't" not "was'nt" for instance) Schatzing's gift for prose survives largely unscathed while his ability to generate tension and a bit of horror is top notch. Environmentalists will cheer, Americans will get the short end of the stick (the author takes special aim at the CIA), and fans of the genre will marvel at how quickly 900 pages goes by.

Loved the premise of nature getting back at man for his carelessness of his planet -or is it ONLY nature?. The science got a little heavy for me at times and I would have appreciated the lighter book to lug around.Nevertheles, I was kept engaged enough to keep going back to it. Schatzing also kept me in suspense continuously because no characters were safe. I was almost tempted to peek at the back to see if fave characters made it through-a cardinal sin for avid readers, I know, but I resisted and was kept on edge until the end.

Read: Oct - Dec 2024
Rating: 5/5 stars, best of 2024

Wow! This story is amazing - a detailed, ultra-scientific examination of how a global community could work together to combat a severe ecological threat to humanity. I originally watched the TV mini-series and while I enjoyed it (aside from the way it ended - thankfully the book ending was much better) I felt like half the story was missing. Characters behaved according to the needs of a fairly thin plot and I could sense there was a better story somewhere in there that hadn't quite been told.
Then I discovered it was based on an 1,150 page novel and it all made sense!
The Swarm is centred around two main characters - Sigur Johanson, a debonair Norwegian marine biologist and university show more professor, and Leon Anawak, a young Inuit who specialises in the study of whales off the coast of Canada. There is a whole host of well-rounded, supportive characters - from the ambitious but devious American Judith Li who has the ear of the president, to the chain-smoking SETI scientist Samantha Crowe. There is a villain-turned-hero arc for the Native American dolphin specialist Greywolf, and an underplayed love story between Leon and scientific journalist Karen Weaver. All the while, the underwater threat posed by the Yrr grows ever more dangerous to those on land.
It took me two months to read this book from start to finish and I loved it. While I appreciate the existence of the TV series for introducing me to the novel, I can see just how much of a hugely missed opportunity it was. Hopefully it will one day get the adaptation it deserves. show less

Frank Schätzing's The Swarm is a superb if not intimidating book, some people may be weary of its size at 881 pages but I can assure you it’s well worth the time. Rather than reading two potentially average books you can devote said time to this, an excellent book. I enjoyed this to the point that I’d say it’s one of the best, if not the best book I’ve read so far this year (my 68th book in April 2020).

Whilst initially it seems like a bit of a monster in the deep novel, it expands into an all-encompassing disaster novel bringing the world to the brink of collapse. Whilst it does feature a bit of a stereotypical portrayal of Americas as Christian fundamentalists who see themselves as blessed by God and the only solution to show more problems is to kill, it’s not to the point that is derails the narrative. One could even say in some ways it brings it up to date with the current themes prevalent in large swaths of American society (yes, I write this as a foreigner looking in from the outside).

Overall, it was an excellent thriller with speculative aspects that give food for thought on the current manner in which humanity conducts itself, the science fiction aspects are believably possible and despite its size, it’s quite a page turner. show less

Having heard this one mentioned a few times (in mostly good terms), I requested it from the library. And, only when I picked it up from the local branch did I realise it clocked in at nearly 900 pages. (It's a hand-to-hand fightin' book, and one to make my fellow commuters quake with fear.) I have since learnt to check the page count on the online library catalogue.

At the beginning of the book, I was rather chuffed because only a few days previously I'd been watching whales and dolphins frolic off the east coast of Australia, and it seemed rather wonderful to carry on in that vein. Even if the whales in The Swarm were more interested in wreaking destruction on humankind. Yep, you read that right. No Flipper here.

The plot starts off all show more over the globe, with strange things happening at sea. After a while, it does concentrate on various characters, probably because the death rate is quite startling so all extraneous characters have been removed through being eaten by an orca or some such. It does continue to throw new characters at the reader at an astounding rate, but it's okay, you don't need to remember them all, they probably won't survive the chapter in which they were introduced. Most of the (surviving) characters are well drawn and complex, and easily distinguishable from each other (although I got some of the Northern European names muddled), and it was wonderful to have so many brainy scientists (as opposed to kick boxing scientists, I guess) saving the world by working together.

It was quite gripping, although had a number of the annoying bits that European thrillers (well, The Girl With... series) seem to have: lots (and lots) of exposition clunkily handled at the start, before the real plot kicks in. This may be endemic to thrillers as a whole, I only ever seem to read ones translated from European languages. (There's my literary snob streak.)

And towards the end of the book I was beginning to feel it had overstayed its welcome. My arms were tired from lugging it around, and there was far too much genetics in the final chapters. While I happily enjoyed the vast majority of the very well explained and researched science (apart from the over loading of information about drilling for oil in the North Sea from the beginning chapters), I did find my eyes glazing over with the explanations of genetic code towards the end there. I think I just wanted a few more explosions, followed by a happy ending after two weeks of solid reading. But instead I got some very trippy scenes (that were a bit much to read late at night), and then what (finally) surprisingly turned out to be an excellent final chapter: nicely ambiguous, but with room for hope.

What I mostly liked though is that it seems to have changed how I view the world, which is a great achievement. For me, it really rammed home the interconnectedness of nature, and our precarious position on the planet. I was always aware of green themes, but it put it into perspective, I guess. Now let's see if it's a permanent state of affairs... show less

What if the aliens in *The Abyss* weren't friendly? The result is this sweeping eco-disaster thriller that makes for a delightful (if a bit bloated) binge-read. The characters are a somewhat flat (only the Inuit cetologist seems to have any depth, and the novel has to remove him from the action to a personal side-quest to establish and resolve that), but that suits this story that draws its inspiration from Big Disaster Cinema, which it namechecks throughout.

A genuine eco-thriller. It reminds me a bit of Overstory by Richard Powers. Overstory was more slowly paced, more thoughtful. The Swarm is more action. It gets a bit over-done at the end - a bit of fun to see a German writer casting Americans as the villains. Really it is quite on target!

It's a real page turner, for sure. I didn't quite read it in one sitting, but I almost could have.

With this kind of book, it's fun to guess at the boundary between fact and fiction. Leon goes to Nunavut - I got on Google maps to look at Cape Dorset. The whole main story line is rather far-fetched, but not absurdly so at all.

I doubt that any anti-ecology people would be moved by this book. The story is too wild. So I fear it is just preaching to the show more choir. Still, bit by bit we do need to figure out, not just that we are utterly interwoven into the biosphere, but we need to find ways to help spread that message, to incorporate it deeply into our world view. I don't see how this book will do the job, but it's a step in that direction that others should be able to build on. show less