Book Review – Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town

Author: Cory Doctorow
Cover Artist: Dave McKean
Publisher: Tor
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: August 2005

Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town is a step away from his prior science fiction, in the direction of magical realism. In this thoughtful book, he broadens and develops his range, but still delights with some sparkling ideas.

He’s created a strange world, almost identical to our own, except that an animist undercurrent means that islands can be born from the union of mountains and washing machines. Doctorow draws this out so naturally that I wondered if he was speaking metaphorically at first.

The prose is charming and artful, with quirky and sympathetic characters of the sort I usually love, yet against my expectations I found myself unsatisfied at the end.

Alan, the protagonist, seems a genial, if eccentric, entrepreneur taking time off from small business to write a story. He renovates a house in the Toronto suburbs, but his plans are derailed by his neighbours, family, and his involvement in a guerilla wireless scheme.

Though Alan has tried to build a normal life for himself independent of his family, his past returns to confront him. Doctorow’s use of this odd family is a neat exploration of familiar themes in family life, especially sibling relations.

Alan’s family is dysfunctional, in a fantastic way. His father is a mountain, his mother a washing machine. And they’re normal, compared to his brothers, who include a set of Matrioshka dolls (E~, F~ and G~); a seer, B~; and D~, who was killed by his siblings, but hasn’t let that hold him back.

All of the brothers change names repeatedly (keeping the initial letter, thus Alan becomes Adam, and so on). This could be a way of depicting fluid identity, or different aspects of personality, or something. Anyway, it lost its freshness for me eventually.

Intertwining story lines set in different times show you how Alan became the person he is, and his response to the crises that confront him when his brother Davey comes back. It tells of Alan’s coming to terms with his life, his background, his family.

The book is interesting throughout, with with moments of insight and humour, and some memorable, well-drawn characters, although I was somewhat disappointed in the brother Davey, who seems to have simply been born evil.

While the book was a pleasure to read, a charming journey (although at times whimsical, grotesque, painful), I was never drawn fully into the author’s world. And in the end, I was left with a slight, lingering dissatisfaction.

At first I thought that the book’s moderate length was commendable, but I now wonder if the book might have improved with more work on the abrupt ending, exploration of the milieu, or fleshing out of the book’s characters. I would have appreciated more about B, or even C (the brother who is an island).

Doctorow has made the novel available for free online. It will definitely appeal to some readers more than others – I recommend that you try the electronic version before you buy a copy.

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