Miku the Literary Cat Review: Blake Crouch - Dark Matter

INTERSTELLAR BECOMES INNER-STELLAR IN MULTIVERSE ADVENTURE

Miku’s take:

“As a two year old cat, I was unhappy with the block of time that was taken up reading this book and therefore not playing with me. Normally she will read a book over two or three days giving me lots of windows of time for attention.

She read this in the garden in a morning and as much as I tried to play with her by bringing over big balls of string and being obviously cute she didn’t respond which made me annoyed.

I heard her tell my Dad he wouldn’t like it, but other than that I didn’t listen because I was more concerned with where my lunch was.”

• one out of four paws, do not recommend if you like an attentive subject.

Miku’s Mum’s take:

There is a scene at the end of the movie Interstellar that my partner hates with more vitriol than he has reserved for any other scene in any other movie. His gripe is about the end of a film which up until that point has done a decent job of being within a periodic element or two away from proper science, but then the plot takes a space-walk out into the schmaltzy idea of family being the centre of the universe… via magic bookcase.

It’s for that reason that I don’t recommend this book to him. The concept is the same in many ways. The man who creates doorways to a multiverse in one timeline could very easily go and meet the man who didn’t. The man who chose family and red wine and soccer practice over science accolades and, of course, a cool tidy apartment that is at once his, but also not lived it.

It’s like a softer Rick and Morty, without the laughs or pathos but with impressive incredible page-turning pace which means that doesn’t really matter. I read it in one sitting on a beautiful summer’s day. I loved Crouch’s dialogue, and played it out in my head as if watching the latest blockbuster Netflix series. It was no surprise for me to then discover he had an earlier trilogy that was adapted for TV - Wayward Pines.

Without giving away spoilers, the action-led chapters take us to a very similar place to the Interstellar travesty, with more introspection about what could have been, and who any of us really are. But there are magic portals all the same. Don’t tell him indoors.