Review (sample): J. Remark, Nameless?: Freeland
J. Remark’s Nameless: Freeland is listed as Book 1 of a series; properly speaking, the title listing at Amazon is Nameless - Freeland: (Parts 1 - 4) (Rainbow System Stories). I’m not quite sure what to make of that. In any event, the volume description is as follows:
Having a memory loss and waking up in another world is never a good combination.
When the US Army war veteran wakes up in a strange new place, he has to find answers as nothing around him makes any sense. The strange new world looks rather beautiful and life seems idyllic and so full of promises... if he could only remember his own name...
Short and to the point, which is no bad thing. In any event, I read the sample.
The general idea, as indicated by the description, is what some people call “portal fantasy”: the protagonist is flung across space and time to a new world in which everything is different and fantastical. When people talk about this, they usually reference Narnia, but for me, the classic foundation of this mode is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ yarns about John Carter on Mars. (Incidentally, although people generally trashed the semi-recent John Carter film, it was actually good fun, and fairly true to the books.)
In many respects, Freeland or Nameless (I’m really not sure which is the title) is a take on John Carter rather than Narnia. The main character is a trained fighter, and he finds himself in a horrible world where creepy guys try to catch and eat children, whom of course our hero immediately rescues. It’s done in a relatively modern style, with gritty detail about unpleasantness like the starvation conditions and so forth, but the concept seems similar.
Like John Carter of Mars, the tale is told in the first person, so that we have an immediate sense of the unnamed (he’s amnesiac, so he doesn’t remember it himself) hero’s bewilderment. The author spends a lot of time at the outset on painting a broad picture: color, emptiness, lush greenery, wonder, etc. But then we’re plunged into awfulness as the toothless deviants try to net desperate, fleeing children.
We’re told that there’s a steampunk vibe here, which is the protagonist’s comparison. We don’t know quite what to make of that, because apart from the cobbled-together, vaguely Mad Max vehicles (his comparison again), it doesn’t seem post-apocalyptic on the one hand, nor fantasy-Victorian on the other. But nobody said that the hero is terribly bright, after all.
In fact, I have very little impression of him. He seems decent enough, albeit more than slightly limited in vocabulary and general knowledge, but he doesn’t have a lot of personality. We kind of follow along, hoping to pick up some thread, something trajectory that he’s missing but that will turn out to be essential to the plot. Something of the kind, anyway. But so far as I’ve seen, anyway, we don’t get that. So it all feels rather unstable and meandering. I’m not sure where we’re going with this, is what I’m saying. I can see that the toothless deviants have to get it in the neck, but our hero doesn’t seem nearly heroic and larger-than-life enough to make that happen, nor is he some sort of cunning strategist who’s going to engineer their self-destruction.
All in all, the thing strikes me as ambitious but unfinished. I’d like to see it get a lot of reading and comment from others; as with so many indie-published books I see, this one feels like the author finished a draft and just put it out there. And that’s a pity, because it needs polish if it’s going to do what the author hopes.
Anyway, if you read this book (whatever it’s actually called), do let me know what you thought, and whether any of my comments were on the mark.