The three star rating is a temporary rating because this book will definitely need some pondering and possibly a reread or two.I have to admit to getting lost in the philosophical discussions and the several threads didn't help the flow of the novel for me personally. Everything tied up neatly at the end (I think) but this wasn't an easy book by any means.
My favourite book for several months.
I have mixed feelings about Roberts' fiction - I liked Jack Glass, hated On and felt By Light Alone was sort of "meh" - but I will go quite a long way out of my way to read his non-fiction. Sibilant Fricative is a collection of "Essays and Reviews" on science fiction and fantasy, ranging from a consideration of The Hobbit to a very funny review of the film Battle Los Angeles (my favourite in the collection). All the pieces in the book (OK, not the Old English pastiche, to be fair) are accessible and funny and above all clever exegeses on a genre which isn't often covered by academic criticism, and I often couldn't wait to get home from work to read some more (which is not a thing I often say about literary criticism).
I did feel that Paul Kincaid's introduction felt a little rushed, and perhaps a little patronising ("feel free to disagree!" is, in effect, the substance of the introduction - thanks so much, I really needed your permission), and there are a few copyediting issues: misspellings, odd layouts and the like. (Much of the material in the book is collected from online sources, and I wondered if that was the source of the issue.) But I enjoyed the actual content of the book so much that I could overlook the cosmetic issues with it.
The world of On is one endless wall to which its inhabitants cling, living small and precarious lives on crags and shelves, never more than a few feet away from the edge of the world.
One day, Tighe, a villager, falls off the wall and onto another ledge whose existence he's never suspected. There, an army is preparing for war, a war into which Tighe is pressganged. His fight takes him to forests where there are man-eating insects and into slaving cities and to mountains of ice and eventually he discovers (or, rather, the reader discovers) something about the nature of the wall itself.
Which all sounds quite fun. Unfortunately, it's not.
For a start, On is slow-moving, especially at the beginning, and what should be an average-sized book (385 pages) feels absolutely interminable. To make matters worse, none of what happens is very interesting: nothing in the book made me care about Tighe, about his losses and his gains. Also, Tighe is a fairly unpleasant character
The plot itself just feels like - well, it feels like the novel I'm writing for NaNoWriMo, if I'm honest: like Roberts is just making vaguely plausible stuff up to hit his daily word count. It's bizarre. None of it seems to have any connection to anything else that comes before or after it. And some of what happens is pretty horrible: the scene with the man-eating insects is not at all for the faint of heart.
Actually, thinking about Roberts' work (he's an SFF critic as well as a novelist) I suspect that On is actually an extended literary experiment: it's about change, flux, how nothing is still and nothing stands. Which, fine, but it doesn't make for very interesting novelling. There's nothing vital about Roberts' writing here, nothing urgent. It's simply detached, dry and really bloody long.