Book Review | Ajax Penumbra 1969 by Robin Sloan

San Francisco, 1969. The summer of drugs, music and a new age dawning. A young, earnest Ajax Penumbra has been given his first assignment as a Junior Acquisitions Officer - to find the single surviving copy of the Techne Tycheon, a mysterious volume that has brought and lost great fortune for anyone who has owned it. After a few weeks of rigorous hunting, Penumbra feels no closer to his goal than when he started. But late one night, after another day of dispiriting dead ends, he stumbles upon a 24-hour bookstore and the possibilities before him expand exponentially. With the help of his friend's homemade computer, an ancient map, a sunken ship and the vast shelves of the 24-hour bookstore, Ajax Penumbra might just find what he's seeking...

***

Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore was, without question, one of last year's most endearing debuts. A short novel about a tech-savvy shop assistant drawn inexorably into what is a magnificent mystery, at least initially, Robin Sloan's fontastic fantasy began brilliantly, before revealing itself to be a book about the absolute good of Google—and as I concluded in my review, "that's not what I come to my speculative fiction for, frankly."

Happily, this brief prequel isn't half as distracted as the originating fiction, in large part because it's set in the sixties: in 1969, specifically, during the last days of the Summer of Love.

But that's not what motivates our narrator. That's not why he's travelled to San Francisco. As one of his accomplices allows, "drugs, music, a new age dawning... and you came for an old book." (p.39)

A Junior Acquisitions Officer for the Occult Literature Department of the library of a college known as "the Harvard of Northwestern Illinois," (p.10) young Ajax Penumbra is blessed with a quest, outlined here in an effective second-person address:

You learn that the Tycheon—as it is more casually know to the approximately three people alive who care about its existence—did not enjoy a large print run, but the few copies that ever existed made quite an impression. It is, apparently, a book of prophecy, and Brindle's file is full of suggestive scraps. In 1511, a merchant in Liverpool extolls its virtues. Almost a century later, in 1601, a fortune-teller in London cannot work without it. The fortune-teller's apprentice praises the Tycheon just as effusively, but apparently misses an important prediction; he is murdered in 1657. The trail goes red, and cold. Your quest begins. (p.17)

Penumbra's investigations soon lead him to San Francisco, where he hopes to locate the last known owner of The Craft of Fortune. Sadly, he finds no trace of William Gray.

As a last resort, he asks around in an array of likely locations, including the 24-Hour Bookstore a Mr Mohammed Al-Asmari mans. Here, he shares his story, only to be told by the owner that this William Gray isn't an individual at all—it's a ship, long since sunk in an area of the Bay that has lately been reclaimed.

He walks the city, dispirited. It is something, he tells himself, to have determined the fate of the William Gray and the book he sought there. But it is still a failure. His first assignment as a Junior Acquisitions Officer, and it came to nothing. 

Carol Janssen found the Book of Dreams in a remote Peruvian village. Another acquisitions officer, Julian Lemire, pulled the diary of Nebuchadnezzar II out of an active volcano. Langston Armitage himself has traveled to Antarctica twice. Now, Penumbra has come so close to his own prize, and yet it is beyond his reach. A whole city blocks his way." (p.29)

There are glimmers of hope, however: tunnels have been dug under the city to make way for the BART, which is to say San Francisco's revolutionary rapid transit system. If one of these is near the rotten wreck of the ship, and if Penumbra can access it somehow, then perhaps... perhaps there's a chance. Assuming the book isn't already ruined. That's a lot of ifs, admittedly, but our man means to make sure.

Readers, I'm relieved to report that Ajax Penumbra 1969 is a delight. It might well be more satisfying than the book it introduces, and the fact that it's substantially shorter is one of the secrets of its success. At a hundred pages at a push in Atlantic's handsome new hardcover, and only then including several appendixes—namely an interview with the author and the first chapter of Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore—Ajax Penumbra 1969 is never in danger of overstaying its welcome, nor are there any of the pointless packing peanuts of plot that proved such a problem in the author's other novel.

It's a far tighter text than Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, all told, and it follows that this focus leaves little room for the extended digressions that distracted in Sloan's debut. Crucially, Google hasn't happened yet, and though one subplot involves an early attempt at networking—"using a computer is just not a thing that a person does" (p.12) in 1969, but never mind—even this section serves a pair of purposes, adding as it does to our understanding of Sloan's central character, as well as laying the groundwork for his future fascinations.

Ajax Penumbra 1969 boasts a narrative never less than neat, a spectacularly rendered setting and another array of charming characters—oh, Mo! I enjoyed your company so—all the while maintaining a markedly better balance between what's plot and what's not than evidenced in its predecessor. What we have here is a perfectly pleasant prequel to one of last year's most promising novels that reminded me of the reasons I was so sweet on said. I can only hope Sloan has more such stories in store.

***

Ajax Penumbra 1969
by Robin Sloan

UK Publication: June 2014, Atlantic
US Publication: September 2013, FSG

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Book Review | Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

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Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his job as a web-designer and into a job working the night shift at Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It is a curious shop with curious customers who wander in only to borrow obscure encoded volumes, all according to some arrangement with the mysterious Mr Penumbra. 

Intrigued and a little bored, Clay runs a computer analysis of the customers’ behaviour – and discovers that the dusty books and their dusty readers hold the key to a secret that stretches right back to when bookmaking began.

***

Have you ever felt the need to read? Been struck by the siren song of an awesome novel?

If you have — and I warrant we (you, reading this, and me) are well acquainted with this wonderful weakness — if you have, you'll know that it's one thing to want a book, but another to need one; to feel with every fibre of your being that you cannot be complete until you have swallowed the whole of some story.

For Clay Jannon, in his youth, the concluding volume of The Dragon-Song Chronicles fit the bill above, but in the years since the climax of said fictional fantasy saga, he hasn't felt so intensely about anything else. Not a book, not a woman, not a job — not nothing. Down on his luck at the outset of Robin Sloan's endearing if digressive debut, and hoping, perhaps, to recapture some of that passion, he applies for a job in a small bookshop in the Broadway district of San Francisco.

And that's all it takes. From the moment Clay crosses the threshold of Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, life is suddenly interesting again.

Inside: imagine the shape and volume of a normal bookstore turned up on its side. This place was absurdly narrow and dizzyingly tall, and the shelves went all the way up — three stories of books, maybe more. I craned my neck back [...] and the shelves faded smoothly into the shadows in a way that suggested they might go on forever. (pp.7-8)

In part, this puzzling new perspective rallies his passion — his need, indeed. And it isn't long before Clay realises there's something funny going on when it comes to Mr Penumbra's customers. That said, it's a stretch to even call them customers, because they don't buy books from the front of the store: rather, they rent them from its mysterious rear.

Clay's first thought is that these folks are part of an arcane lending library, and soon his curiosity gets the better of him: he breaks the first rule of this unusual book club, and looks at one of the musty old tomes. He doesn't find a story, but a code... and down the rabbit hole he goes!

What unfolds is a magnificent mystery, initially. An investigation into what Clay christens the Waybacklist and the readers evidently addicted to it. It isn't to give the game away to say they're actually code-crackers: initiates of an ancient order dedicated to the study of a puzzle which has gone unsolved for many centuries. Their promised reward for finally figuring out this riddle? No less than life eternal.

To followers of the order, this is practically "catnip: a code to be cracked and the key to immortality, all in one," (p.148) though Clay is less than convinced by its supernatural aspect:

"I don't believe the immortality part, but I do know the feeling that Penumbra is talking about. Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits. That's just a feeling, not a fact, but remember (I repeat): people believe weirder things than this." (p.147)

Which, sure, is true.

But Clay, needless to say, is a child of our time. The only things he really has faith in are his mobile phone and his MacBook, so of course he cannot resist applying contemporary tech to the old code Penumbra has dedicated his days to deciphering. This ambitious endeavour leads him to cross paths with Kat, who works for Google, and has at her fingertips resources equivalent to many million like minds.

I'm afraid this is where Sloan's first novel loses the larger part of its pull, because as soon as Google gets a look in, the narrative practically collapses. To a certain extent, the corporation's involvement helps to situate to strange amongst the true, lending credibility to the story's more incredible elements, but the trade-off is just too much. With every passing chapter, the central mystery becomes less magnetic.

Like The Shadow of the Wind, to which this text bears a deceptive resemblance, Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is at its very best when it taps into our love of literature — and at its very best, it is as remarkable a novel as Carlos Ruiz Zafon's first for adult audiences: a cryptic diptych, equally smart and sweet, warm and honest, esoteric, intriguing, and wonderfully witty.

Sadly, Sloan struggles to sustain the most effective elements of his debut, indulging instead in lengthy love letters to the aforementioned gods of tomorrow's technology — among a number of less distracting digressions. That said, these occur so often, and over the course of such a short novel, that an alarming proportion of the whole seems composed of packing peanuts; a miscellany of meaningless material that serves solely to pad out the plot of the laconic Kindle single I was unsurprised, ultimately, to learn Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore began as.

I wanted to love Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, and admittedly, there were bits of it I did, gathered around the outset especially. Additionally, Clay is a great narrator, and most of the story's supporting characters — Ajax and Kat and Mat — are as winning as him. The narrative, however, simply lacks substance... except, I suppose, as an ode to the enduring beauty of Google. And that's not what I come to my speculative fiction for, frankly.

***

Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore
by Robin Sloan

UK Publication: August 2013, Atlantic Books
US Publication: October 2012, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading