I picked up this book looking for a light, relatively trashy and fun read. And clearly that is the kind of book Grimwood was aiming to write. This book is without a shred of literary pretension. (In one particularly irritating stylistic turn which persists for about 3 chapters before, fortunately, vanishing, Grimwood starts virtually every other sentence with the phrase "Mind you...") Redrobe ultimately sinks to such a low of poor plotting and thin characterization that it even fails to make the grade as trash.

Redrobe is the story of Axl, erstwhile abused youth turned film star turned mercenary turned assasin for hire turned McDonald's burger flipper. If you think this string of disparate occupations will be cleverly tied together in the narrative, think again. Grimwood's fairly lame attempt at injecting humor by giving gun-toting tough guy, Axl, a job at the golden arches seems to have been ripped off from Neal Stephenson's pizza delivery boy, Hiro Protagonist. Only in Stephenson's book the food services profession of his hero makes sense. Not so here. Axl's past is as incomprehensible and randomly thrown together as are his (and all of the other character's, for that matter) motivations for any of the action that takes place in the book. Hero Axl is described in at least a dozen different and mutually contradictory ways such as sullen and laconic as well as explosive and hyperactive. Yet somehow his actions manage to support none of the pages of cliche which are lavished upon describing him. Unfortunately, none of the books' characters manages to win even an ounce of sympathy making it very difficult to get through. Axl is trying to be a gritty, anti-hero but only manages to come off as whiney and fairly dumb. The only character in the book who is at all interesting is Axl's gun who through a series of fairly poorly plotted and illogical coincidences, ends up as a silver flying monkey. Unfortunately, as said monkey has near god-like powers, he spends most of the novel flitting in and out of the action playing the part of an almost literal deus ex machina and then conveniently vanishing or refusing to help (for no plausible reason) when his powers would obviate another pointless shoot out. I couldn't help but feel that the talking gun was a pastiche on Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with Occasional Music. And again, the original does it much, much better.

But anyway... the story revolves around Axl's quest to find the dead pope's sister and thereby discover what said pope did with all of the vatican's squandered money. There is enormous potential for humor and irony in this but this goes largely unexploited by Grimwood. The story plays out in a series of tedious episodes which drag along, punctuated by random extreme violence. My biggest objection to the gratuitous violence is that most of it is completely wasted as the description's are so dull and vapid you are hard pressed to feel anything. The fact that I could read through pages describing some of the most horrendous acts of torture and violence without even wincing tells me that Grimwood should have spent less time on dreaming up hyperbolic gross out scenes and more on developing some vivid, or at least marginally meaningful, language. I have been far more disturbed by far lesser scenes of violence than redrobe serves up merely because they were described by someone who at least sounded as if they knew what they were talking about. Grimwood's talk of torture, rape, and other mayhem comes off incredibly phoney. It's somewhat like reading the description of a violent fight as written by a 12 year old: there's plenty of gore and other "gross out" effects to bulk it up but no sense whatsoever that Grimwood has the merest clue what he is talking about. The plot finally limps home to a weak and disappointing ending which leaves the majority of the questions raised by the book completely unanswered. By the time I got to the end, however, I was not at all surprized by this, as the plotting is overall so full of holes and inconsistent that I scarcely expected all of the random threads that had been thrown out to be addressed, let alone neatly tied up.

This book is packed with a lot of genuinely interesting and potentially very amusing ideas. Unfortunately, they don't hold together at all as a cohesive unit and go largely unexploited. I found it to be overall a boring and frustrating read. The characters, dialogue, and politics of the book are extremely hollow. I think Mr. Grimwood was aiming for gritty and dark with this novel, but it comes off more as adolescent and fairly tepid. As far as advancing any new ideas in the cyberpunk genre, look elsewhere. Any cyberpunk elements of the novel have been directly lifted from Gibson et al and are sort of randomly strewn about leaving me wondering if Grimwood even understood the ideas he has so obviously cribbed. As a fun, trash novel this book might have some potential if your expectations are extremely low. Overall, I found it too poor even to enjoy on that level.

This one is a lot of fun (and probably shouldn't be). The anti-hero, AXL, is a tangle of self-contradictions that make him not so much complex as convoluted. He has built a reputation for being good at things that no one should ever be good at, and he frequently wants to fail even as he struggles desperately to succeed. The resulting tension kept me turning the pages long after I should have gone to sleep. I'm not sure the plot ever did make sense to me, but I'm fairly confident that the author never intended that it should. While this may violate a fundamental rule of story telling (the whole thing must make some sort of sense in the end), it strikes me as a recognizable -- if distorted -- view of real life. As weird as Grimwood's vision of the future is, it's not any stranger than a world that can produce the likes of Jerry Springer and the infamous 'Bum Fights' videos. If you are a fan of cyberpunk, this is as darkly distopian as it gets. Dress warm, make sure your gun is loaded, and I'll see you on the other side. ;)

The gun is a lot of fun, the world is interesting, Axl entertains. It's a Pulp Fiction type of read, with some of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and William Gibson's Neuromancer. While not brilliant -- and not overly deep -- It is good and deep enough, and I enjoyed it enough to buy Grimwood's other release, Remix.