26. The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Years ago, after reading River of Gods, I had said that I would look for more Ian McDonald books.  I clearly did not live up to my word, as my excellent gift-giver brother-in-law, gave me this one last xmas and I had completely forgotten about who the author was.  I actually didn't really make the connection until after I was finished this one and I went back and searched my own blog.  My overall feelings were very similar for this book as well.  I quite enjoyed it, though without the excitement I had for River of Gods, but in the end it felt a bit somehow empty to me.  That's not entirely fair, as I really got into the narrative of Can, the adventurous 9 year-old boy with the heart condition and to some degree, that of his older friend, disgraced and failed professor Georgios Ferentinou.

The story takes place in near future Istanbul.  Turkey has joined the EU and nanotech is the big technology shift.  We follow several different characters on various quests, the two mentioned above, as well as a young gas commodities trader plotting a secret deal, an art dealer looking for the Mellified Man (this is a really cool concept), a young woman marketing graduate trying to find deals for her cousins' new bionanotech and a broken young man caught in a suicide bomber nano attack.  It's a lot to take in at the beginning.  The organizing motif is the Dervish House, which is a centuries old building they all live in.  It took me a while to figure that out, as well as what was going on.  The writing is really dense at times, almost too much so to my taste, so that it is slow going for the first half.

The portrayal of Istanbul (though I've read it may be somewhat inaccurate in many details that might almost make it laughable to actual people who live there) was what kept it going for me.  Even in the current times, it is a city that has always interested me.  I'd love to go visit there someday.  You really get a sense of the density and chaos and smells and feelings of this complex, layered historical bridge between Europe and Asia.

Once you finally figure out what is going on, the narrative definitely picks up and the book becomes quite fun. The last quarter is a real page-turner, though I could have gone with a bit more of a bang at the end.  

I realize that McDonald's thing is to sci-fi up different countries and cultures.  I guess that's a cool endeavour and I have had fun reading two of them, but it also feels a bit cultural appropriational.  I would prefer to read a sci-fi book about Istanbul by a Turkish sci-fi author, which I bet there are out there.  That being said, McDonald has a lot of intriguing other books out there, including his Luna series, which is supposed to be like a sci-fi Game of Thrones on the moon.  I'm not going to hunt these down because my on-deck shelf is almost spilling off the edge, but if they come to me in the future, I will read them.