Veteran by Gavin Smith

I thought, when I bought this for my kindle, that a book from a large publishing house like Gollancz would guarantee a certain standard. Particularly given the £5.99 price tag (even on Kindle). I guess I just didn't - couldn't - believe the one- and two-star reviews it was getting on Amazon. This was Gollancz, for Christ's sake! Those reviewers were expecting something different? Maybe it was a matter of taste? How should I know? Unless, of course, I read it. So I did.

Well, I finally finished it and I now understand what those low ratings were about. 

It's not that it's a bad book. Indeed, it has a lot going for it. The settings involved some nice touches, such as the oil rig city, the nomadic country and the flooded US coast. All of them were visually powerful ideas, and well-rendered.

The main character, Jakob Douglas, is a veteran of an extraterrestrial war against 'Them'. (Can the human race, in this book, honestly not think up a proper name for their enemies. Is 'Them' the best technical and/or derogatory term the media, politicians, scientists, generals and thousands of battle-weary soldiers could come up with? Hmm. Okay, maybe.) So Douglas is a vet, now back on Earth. Scotland, to be precise. Nice. He's been cybernetically altered with loads of pretty cool hardware, which has been locked, now he's stood down, because he'd be a danger to the public if he had access to his weapons. Given his dreams, that's fair comment. The guy's head's a mess. Shortly after explaining all this to us, he's suddenly recalled and all his equipment is reactivated, leaving him to wreak havoc on some poor, unsuspecting bad guys. 
 

His boss, with whom Douglas has some pretty bad history, instructs him to go north to neutralise a downed 'Them' before it lets loose on the general public and annihilates half of Scotland. Following its trail, he encounters Morag, a young prostitute, who convinces him the Them is actually an okay guy and insists on helping it. Douglas decides to help her and in the process surrenders everything about his character that makes him interesting. From this point on, he's more often than not an observer in events he doesn't understand and can't control. When he does get involved - usually in the action sequences - the story takes on the dimension it lacks in the rest of it. It's a real shame, because the rest of it is, frankly, a bit crap.

The core idea has some merit - the nanomachine-like 'Them' construct melds with an AI to create an IT version of God, whose purpose is to give total access of every scrap of human information to absolutely everyone. You can see why the government want to stop it, right? Well, they try. Douglas and the band of merry men he's accumulated on the way aim to stop them. 

The problem lies in how we get from Douglas locating the Them to the final showdown, which, to be fair, is pretty spectacular. The pace during the intervening stretch is slow, littered with atrocious dialogue (three pages, at one point, debating the merits of the only female character at around the level of 'She's a whore', 'No she's not', 'Yes, she is', 'No she's not'). There were several scenes that didn't really have much point - including one where he's supposed to fight to the death just for someone's amusement. I mean, please!

The standard of writing leaves a lot to be desired, bordering, in places, on amateur. It's clear no professional editor even glanced through it, and at one point I actually put the book down, went online and checked whether this writer really was published by Gollancz or if he was taking their name in vain. He's there, on their author list. Come on Gollancz! If you aim to keep your reputation, you should at least employ a copy editor before you okay a book for publication!

It would have been nice if someone had paid attention to the layout, too. Block paragraphs. Really? The 458 pages the book apparently uses is probably more like 350, owing to the extra space taken up by blank lines between paragraphs. Okay, yeah. Now I'm being picky. But it annoyed me, all the same. It meant the layout was more like a typewritten essay than a published book. What's the word? Oh, yes. Unprofessional.

The final impression I got, and this is not to deride the author who, to be fair, has probably tried his best, and is at the mercy of Gollancz and their editorial crew, is that Veteran was meant to be Gollancz's answer to David Gunn's Death's Head series. Unfortunately, it doesn't come close. Smith has a long way to go before he can call himself Gunn's rival. 

Would I read anything else by Gavin Smith? Well, I suspect this was his debut novel, and people grow. I might look at sample extracts of his subsequent novels and maybe take a chance. Maybe.