Dirt Gently's Holistic Detective Agency book review

 This week I read the novel Dirt Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It seems that the time line of this book is really messy, so that I didn't quite understand it when I read it for the first time. The author uses multiple lines of narration, with multiple characters appearing in turn. There is no obvious protagonist among them, and the time span is even from ancient times to now. The suspense of the story is properly hidden in such a large narrative structure, and is not revealed until the last moment. It feels like you need to summarize the two main timelines and then continue to summarize them together at the intersection of the timelines.

 

In this book the author uses the writing technique of multi-line narrative. In the past two years I read more and more foreign works have used this writing technique, I do not know whether now is popular, but I must admit, I really like this kind of narrative technique, especially the combination of such a tight time line and story line, it is easy to make me excited. For instance, when I read that a man came out of the trunk and shot Gordon, I wondered who the figure was, how he got in the trunk, why he wanted to kill Gordon, and what the hell he wanted. But I was even more surprised when I learned that there was more to come.  It kept me looking down until Gordon found himself dead, his soul still alive. He tried to pick up the phone he had left for his sister Susan, but couldn't, unless he controlled his consciousness hard enough to hold on to the object for a few seconds. Poor Gordon died in this way, not knowing what to say to his sister in the message before he died so quickly that he really died as he had joked.

 

It can be said that the writers of this science fiction have a wide range of knowledge and imagination, and the science fiction world they create is often amazing! A person who writes science fiction should not only have a strong knowledge, but also a rich imagination. People who read science fiction also need to have some imagination, but the scope and depth of knowledge may be limited. If I want to truly understand science fiction books, I have to spend some time to explore them.