Black Rainbow (Fiction from Modern China)

The Black Rainbow was an extreme disappointment. I liked the pace and direction the book started off on and even was accepting of the directions it took but in the end it failed to live up to its promise. Touted as a 'continuously challenging... futuristic allegory' by the Dominion Sunday Times on the back cover, the muddled end product was not very original except for its placement in the country of New Zealand (the author lives in Auckland, NZ and so the geographic discriptions are accurate).This book could have benefited from a real, impartial editor. Several inconsistencies were left in that should have been caught by even the most casual editing. The vegetarian protagonist that occassionally has a nice breakfast of bacon and eggs and then several pages later details his vegetarianism to the same people who he just ate with is just one of many examples that a copy editor should have caught.To me this book appeared to be a draft of a final manuscript hurried to publication following the success of Albert Wendt's more famous and (hopefully) better written novels. Is it possible that this book was released to sponge off of his stories made into 'feature films' at about the same time? I suggest this because the book committed one of the biggest literary sins - gratuitous reference to other books written by the same author...at least three times. Even worse, this book also made reference to ITSELF as if it was part of a cannon of literature already in publication and still important well into the future. Only an ego-maniac would hold such high opinion of their own unpublished and apparently un-reviewed work or induluge in such blatant product placement. These self references were included in a lazy literary device to short-cut through a description of scene by simply listing a group of authors, novels or movies that contained the theme of what was occuring. Not only does this quickly make the novel out-dated by the fading popular cultural references but it cheats the reader out of a decent image of what is happening. The author may have been trying to write some sort of avant garde literature but failed to create any new stylistic elements while simultaneously failing to write a coherent or compelling story.Overall grade: D