Polostan by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’d read a couple of Stephenson’s books before this one, so I had an idea of his style: epic scope, jumping around to widely different places, non-linear time. That combination can be tiresome if you don’t have the patience for it, but here it works okay to a point. The protagonist is Aurora (name while in Russia)/Dawn (while in the U.S.), a tall, striking American Communist woman living in the time of the Chicago World’s Fair (1933) and Joseph Stalin. She experiences a wide variety of fantastical and improbable situations – learning to train polo ponies in Montana – learning to use a Tommy gun (and then using it) – forms of torture at the hands of both Americans and Russians, taking in the fair as a walking billboard, and many more. The plot doesn’t really come together until the very end and gives the impression the author just kept writing a series of anecdotes or short stories until he figured a way to unite them. There is a lot of originality in the style and considerable research, especially as to the Chicago Fair. I had trouble keeping characters, settings, and places straight. The plot is too scattered and implausible to give it a high rating, but it was entertaining enough when viewed as a collection of unrelated stories. I was not aware until writing this this review that it was the first in a series. It didn’t catch my interest enough to make me want to read the next one.