🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑
Growing up, Leena has always felt somewhat dissonant; she doesn’t quite fit in with her communities religious zealousness. She despises the Vicar, who whips her small town into a frenzy, spreading rumours of their neighbouring towns suffering from a ‘taint’ which is leading them astray from the path of The Bright One and Her Love. As she watches the people she loves beat and murder innocent towns folk, she rebels. She attacks one of the Bright One’s Agents on Earth (a Blackout) when he hurts a small child, and must face her punishment. That’s when Leena’s life changes for ever; she see’s The Silver Man, and He orders her to follow him. She runs for her very life, trying to keep away from the Blackouts on her tail.
Hobson’s Void is a strange tail. It comprises of three distinct parts, which do not have chapters, simply breaks in the pores. It’s written in the third person perspective, with a present tense, you’re experiencing everything at the same time as Leena is. In Part 1 of the book, that’s fine – it follows a familiar trope: A simple, feudal lifestyle; religious fervour; a battle of morals. It’s when we move to around half way through Part 2 that things take a strange turn. As there’s no chapters, other than the three parts, the change in environment is discombobulating. We veer away from the manic villagers beating each other with sticks, and a mad, life saving dash through the wilderness to sleek metal corridors and rooms that make themselves, even down to the bedding (which, admittedly, is the dream).
The change in the scenery isn’t the only disorientating curveball in Hobsons’s Void. There’s a change in vocabulary, a change in how the story is laid out in a speed that is whiplash fast. Philosophical questions and scientific jargon becomes the main prose. Although Jones may have known what he was writing about, as a reader, I was as helplessly lost as the poor townsfolk purportedly were in the first half of the book.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Hobson’s Void, I just didn’t really understand what was going on.
S. A.
This book was reviewed as part of the Reedsy Discovery ARC program. You can read the original review here
You can buy Hobson’s Void here. It is also available to read for free via Kindle Unlimited.