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The Land Across

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About this listen

An American writer of travel guides in need of a new location chooses to travel to a small and obscure Eastern European country. The moment Grafton crosses the border he is in trouble, much more than he could have imagined. His passport is taken by guards, and then he is detained for not having it. He is released into the custody of a family, but is again detained. It becomes evident that there are supernatural agencies at work, but they are not in some ways as threatening as the brute forces of bureaucracy and corruption in that country. Is our hero in fact a spy for the CIA? Or is he an innocent citizen caught in a Kafkaesque trap?

In The Land Across, Gene Wolfe keeps us guessing until the very end, and after.

©2013 Gene Wolfe (P)2013 Audible, Inc. Fantasy Fiction Science Fiction Espionage
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I'd never read Gene Wolfe before but I knew the name and hence did not expect to be so disappointed. The writing is drab and functional and appears exhausted by simply conveying its own narrative. Maybe it's because I've come straight here from an M John Harrison binge that Wolf's prose strikes me as about as exciting as a 99p travel guide (ironically, given the subject matter of this novel).

The plot itself, as well as being dull, comes across as contrived and the characters are shoe-horned into their roles, much like in a post-90s Stephen King novel. You get the impression that if you jumped into the writer's world, grabbed one of his characters and demanded they explain why they were doing what they were doing, they would scratch their chin and grimace before admitting, with a puzzled little laugh, that they honestly don't know. You might go on to suggest in that case they might as well forget about the whole thing and go home, at which point they'd thank you, get up and leave.

On the upside, Jeff Woodman's narration is on the ball. He's clearly the go-to guy for central-European female vocals.

Amateurish and insipid

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