"Well? Are you just gonna sit here and let these things kill us?" - Ernest Cline, Armada
DISCLAIMER: This review is, first and foremost, constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. I can’t forecast whether or not you will like it, since I’m quite terrible at recommendations because I always assume that people will like everything I like. Please don't let me put you off reading this book; it's important for you to come to your own decisions about its quality. I was disappointed, but that’s a matter of opinion. Some people are liking it, as I did when I initially read it. Some people are really hating it. So it goes.
Everyone remembers the first time they read Ready
Player One. I remember it like it was yesterday, even though it’s been nearly
two years. I remember the heart-gripping excitement, the edge-of-your-seat
tension, the geeky I-understood-that-reference catharsis of it all -- and I
remember my epic disappointment when I learned that RPO had neither a film
adaption, nor any siblings. When I heard earlier this year that it was due to
have both (God bless you, Spielberg), you can only imagine my excitement. I pre-ordered
Ernest Cline’s second novel, Armada, immediately, and when it arrived in my
mailbox, I fully expected it to be as good as, if not better than, its
predecessor.
In hindsight, this was a bad idea. To compare any
book to Ready Player One is already to stick a lamb in a lion cage; the little guy is
going to get massacred. It was unfair of me to read Armada with such high
expectations, given that RPO is truly in a league of its own. That being said,
there’s a reason it took me a month to write this review: it took me that long
to rid myself of the delusion that Armada was actually good. (I’m so sorry,
Ernest Cline. For what it’s worth, it physically pained me to write that.) My
initial rating for Armada was five stars out of five. So what? It entertained
me, it made me laugh, and it’s RPO’s kid brother; I was biased and punch-drunk,
and I wanted it to be good so badly.
As time has gone on, however, and I’ve struggled through countless drafts of a
positive review, I’ve found myself simply morally unable to go through with it,
and I’ve since taken my rating down a star or two. It might even lose another.
Oxymoronic is my situation: I enjoyed Armada,
but I couldn’t look you in the eyes and tell you that it’s a good book. I just
can’t bring myself to lie like that.
Even when I was still telling myself that Armada is good, I could recognise its
plentiful flaws. The most noticeable is definitely the lukewarm
characterisation. Protagonist Zack Lightman is an eighteen-year-old gamer geek
with supposed IED and only one parent at home. Look at all that potential! Now
watch Cline, bless his soul, totally waste it by making Zack’s IED so
intermittent that he has not a single ‘rage’ throughout the entire book and
never properly developing the promising dynamic between an angry almost-adult
and his young, single mom. To quote Roger Ebert (albeit out of context), Armada is mostly a series of sensations,
strung together on a plot. Zack’s two best friends serve no purpose other than
providing crack-a-grin comic relief when it’s not needed. His ex-girlfriend has
literally no use to the story whatsoever, mentioned briefly in the first
chapter to show that Gamers Can Get Girls Too and then never coming up again.
His beef with the school bully? Nonsensical. His fling with the manic pixie
dream gamer girl? I don’t even know why she made the cast list, and her
characterisation was inconsistent and clichéd to boot: just picture Jane
Lynch’s character in Wreck-It Ralph,
but completely useless. Not a single character was convincingly fleshed out,
most were inconsequential to the storyline and only acted to withdraw some sort
of mangled emotional response from You, Reading This, and none had any
particularly redeeming traits, qualities, or characteristics. Zack even sounded
exactly the same as Wade in Ready Player
One, just incredibly more of an asshole, which ticked me off more than I
care to admit. It feels almost as if Cline cast his eyes over a typical cast
list for a YA novel and filled in all the blanks. Moody ex-girlfriend, gormless
school bully, absent/dead father, eroticised fantasy of a dream girl,
ambiguously ethnic best friend for comic relief: check, check, check, check,
check x2. I’m sure Cline put a world of effort into writing these characters,
and I love him for trying. His hard work just doesn’t show through.
Something
else I noticed but chose to ignore while reading Armada was the plot – or, rather, the kind-of total lack of one.
Okay, so Armada did have a plot—it
followed a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, climax, and resolution
– but said plot just wasn’t good. Firstly, Cline expected me to believe, and
then comprehend and reasonably process, the fact that his massive story
– saturated with elaborate backstory and exposition – happened over the space
of two days. He condensed a modern history of science fiction, the entire
concept of an MMO video game, the foundation of an extra-terrestrial war,
Zack’s whole tragic life story, and the rise and fall of a myriad of terribly
underdeveloped relationships, in a ‘two-day’ time period. It’s just
unrealistic, and so mashed together that the coherent structure becomes
unintelligible. There was also an absolute overabundance of deus ex machina usage; you just knew
that none of the character’s problems would have any significant impact on the
story, because oh, no! We need a passcode to enter the supercomputer! That’s
okay; Zack’s useless manic pixie dream girlfriend just so happens to be a master hacktivist! Oh, no! Cline needed to
justify Zack not getting asked to join the [spoiler redacted] earlier! That’s
okay; we’ll just give him anger management issues that are never properly
addressed, demonstrated, or worked on or with! It just felt weak, and reminded
me of a problem I often face when writing: you have this great idea that will
make an excellent base for a story, but that’s it. No character development, no
convincing subplots, no compelling beginning and no acceptable ending. All
you’ve got is this idea, and I get it: sometimes an idea can feel so good that
you just roll with it anyway, because this is your baby, your passion project,
and you love it so much that you’re blinded to its flaws. That’s what Armada felt like to me: Ernest Cline
piggy-backing off of the success of Ready
Player One to try and get his passion project off the ground. There’s just
no momentum, and thus no trajectory.
Admittedly,
Armada wasn’t all bad. It did keep me mildly entertained most of the way through,
I laughed out loud more than once, and yes, there were some moments where I may
or may not have gotten off on understanding-that-reference. And granted, it
isn’t and could never be Ready Player One,
which was so amazing that I, a writer, can’t put it into words, so unparalleled
that even its author, no matter if he were Whitman or Shakespeare, could even
come close to duplicating it. All that aside, however, I still can’t truthfully
put a positive review out into the world. There’s just not enough for me to go
on. I tried, I had an existential crisis about my moral ambiguity, and I
considered it an abject failure. No matter how much I want it to be, Armada is not a good book – but I still
have hope for Cline. In the words of Ariel Bissett (her review of Armada helped me come to terms with the
fact that I had to write mine – read it here), I haven’t given up on him yet. I
know he can do better than Armada –
the infinite praise on all sides for Ready
Player One is undeniable proof of this – and I know that whatever his next
book may be, I’m going to be excited for it, because the potential is there. Armada just didn’t hit the mark. That’s
okay. We all have our bad days. Cline, from my point of view, is no one-hit
wonder; he’s just a one-hit wonder so far.
TL;DR:
I keep bringing my initial rating for Armada down, because as
it gets further from my having finished it, the illusions of it having actually
been good fade more and more. I wish it could have kept its five star rating, I
really do, but the more I think about it, the more the underdeveloped back
stories and lukewarm characterisation hurt my feelings. I'm absolutely certain
Cline can do better than this. We've all seen him at work. To paraphrase Ariel
Bisset and Gregory White, Armada just
feels rushed and holey, and might make a good movie, but just isn't a good
book. That's not to say I don't trust Ernest Cline -- clearly I do, if I went
on pretending Armada was good for so
long -- but I know he can do better. It's just disappointing that he's so far
proved to be a one-trick pony. I'm waiting on tenterhooks for him to prove that
he most certainly is not.
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