Michael Swanwick "The Dragons of Babel"

I have been trying, every so often, to pick up an award winner I have not read.  If they win awards they must be good? Right?  Well Michael Swanwick has picked up several over the years so I thought I would give him a chance.

The lead character goes by the name of Will, which I liked immediately.  The story is basically an adventure yarn that has us follow a young lad who grows into a man while having many adventures.  The twist, if there is one, is that the world in which he is growing up is the realm if Faerie, and he is has human blood and hence no true name.  The realm of Faerie seems to be more dominated by technology than magic and so the whole book is a bit different in the fantasy genre.

The book failed to draw me in and grip me, though it was rich in imagination and detail, they were neither enough to give it the pseudo reality that anyone who reads escapist fiction craves.  The plot seems random, but near the end of the book it starts to make sense, but not enough sense.  I think that as a novel it is perhaps a little bit too bizarre in the picture it paints and the characters it portrays.  I struggled to make sense of the underlying logic, that was its underpinnings, and so was left bereft of comfortable answers to the questions that the novel posed to me.  That being said, this could easily be somebody else's favorite book.  I suspect I simply did not get it, and I will probably give a Swanwick novel another kick of the can, as long as it turns up in a second hand book store.  Unfortunately I would not recommend him to others as of today.