Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (SCTSLT) -- completed as I was tussled and tossed on the TTC ride home tonight. That's how I pretty much read the book, reserving the morning rides to a pretense of sleep or the occasional article from the Economist, and the evening rides home to reading a novel -- SCTSLT being the latest off the piles that surround me in my office. I'm catching up to my reading -- I swear!

This is the first Doctorow novel I've read. The sheer lunacy of the cover description compelled me to pick it up from BMV.

Alan is a middle-aged entrepreneur in contemporary Toronto who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in a bohemian neighborhood. This naturally brings him in contact with the house full of students and layabouts next door, including a young woman who, in a moment of stress, reveals to him that she has wings -- wings, moreover, which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.

Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are a set of Russian nesting dolls.

Now two of the three nesting dolls, Edward and Frederick, are on his doorstep -- well on their way to starvation because their innermost member, George, has vanished. It appears that yet another brother, Davey, whom Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, may have returned ... bent on revenge.

Under such circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to involve himself with a visionary scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet connectivity, a conspiracy spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles of hardware from parts scavenged from the city's Dumpsters. But Alan's past won't leave him alone -- and Davey is only one of the powers gunning for him and all his friends.

And I couldn't put it down. The story jumps back and forth in time, telling the story of Alan's youth, growing up in the cave under his father, as his brothers are tossed out of his mother; going to school, finding love, having his first tragic encounter with death; then leaving home to seek his future, understand who he is and hopefully understanding normal people enough to become them.

The story is set in Kensington Market is rich with characters. Doctorow is at home with the weirdness of blending a son of a mountain with the latest (2005, anyway) in networking technology jargon. His characters are easy to sidle up to in the story as is the weirdness of the story. Even the normal people are rich with weirdness as his fantasy characters are. Doctorow brings fantasy to the everyday -- blending it well with a familiar neighbourhood, its supporting characters and unexceptional goings-on. What makes the story strong and compelling isn't the weirdness of the premise -- although that helps -- but the honesty with which he portrays his characters.

The book is truly a good read for those who enjoy SciFi -- and those who enjoy fiction in general. Stick with it and the ending, it will surprise you.

Oh, and I almost forgot -- Doctorow has made the entire book available online via a Creative Commons license, so you don't even have to buy it.