If nothing else, Adams Roberts's On has a great concept. Tighe, the protagonist, lives on the Worldwall: the ultimate acrophobic's nightmare, the Worldwall is a wall that seems to extend into infinity in every direction. As far back as Tighe and his people can remember, they have lived their precarious existence on ledges cut into or protruding out of the Worldwall. Then, one day, Tighe falls off the edge of one of these ledges and begins plummeting down, out of the only world he has ever known, and into a strange new world of war, religiou, and hideous insects.

Although On is one of Roberts's earlier novels, I found it vastly superior to Polystom, his most recent book. On has some very strong scenes: in the beginning, Roberts effectively describes Tighe's violently dysfunctional family, and later one the book features several gloriously creepy passages, including an escape by Tighe and some fellow soldiers through a haunted forest that ends with the horrific deaths of most of his companions. The world of On--or, rather, both worlds that we see--are also more detailed and more full-featured than the world of Polystom. In the later novel, it sometimes felt like the named protagonists were the only people in the entire solar system. Here, there's a much richer sense of a background against which the protagonists act, particularly after Tighe falls down the Worldwall and lands in a curious and somewhat surreal war. (Popes? Kites? What the hell?)

But On unfortunately shares Polystom's biggest weakness: a bizarre, disconnected "resolution" to the mystery of the Worldwall that, though not quite as much of a suckerpunch as the Matrix-like revolution that concluded Polystom, nonetheless feels insubstantial and unwarranted. This criticism of Roberts's books really involves two claims. First, the events of the main plotlines in On and Polystom--Tighe's struggle with his family and, later, in the war; and Polystom's search for love and then significance--have only the most passing and insignificant relationship with the ultimate explanation of each world. Now, it is possible for a perfectly fine book to be written in a mysterious setting that only glancingly refers to that setting. But if an author wants to write a book like that, s/he must devote the entirety of the novel to the main plotline. Unfortunately, Roberts does not, and this is my second criticism: Instead of letting the events of the books carry through to their logical conclusion, Roberts instead insists that the conclusions of his novels deal almost exclusively with explaining how his curious world came into being, rather than with resolving the plots that he has so painstakingly built.

But I have a larger problem with Roberts's books, one that really came into focus with On. Roberts is a perfectly competent writer, in a technical sense. But his books, unfortunately, are ultimately much more about the Big Motivating Idea than about his characters or his story. The result is that Roberts's books end up feeling insubstantial--and On is no exception. You finish the book feeling like you've just read a fairly long but ultimately superficial exploration of a single idea, and everything else is just fluff that fills out the rest of the pages.

That being said, it is a pretty entertaining ride. It just feels a little thin.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu