Product Description

On 21 July 1969, two astronauts set foot on the moon; far below, in ravaged Africa, a young revolutionary, hailed as the saviour of his country, is murdered by a parcel bomb. From these two unconnected events, Simon Ings has woven a great and glittering web. "The Weight of Numbers" describes the metamorphosis of three people: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the secular beauty of numbers; soap actress Stacey Chavez, whose teenage celebrity has faded, leaving her hungry for fame and starved of love; and Saul Cogan, transformed from 60s prankster to murderous people trafficker. All three are haunted by Nick Jinks, who brings horror and death wherever he goes. It is also a novel that connects disparate events, from the history of electroconvulsive therapy; the Blitz; Communist revolution in Cuba; the birth of TV wrestling; and Antarctic exploration. Simon Ings' novel is a triumph of the imagination and a literary landmark.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #629989 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Review
"One of the literary novels of the year, available B format paperback: 'A new heart of darkness.... It is unlikely that there will be a finer written fiction this year... Dazzling, admirable narrative verve.' Chris Petit, Guardian Stunning reviews: * 'A shimmering tapestry, a truly networked work of fiction.' Dally Telegraph * 'A virtuoso display of imaginative plotting' FT, 'Novels of 2006' * 'Over 400 pages Ings does not give us a single implausible character or unconvincing setting, or write a single bad sentence.' Independent * 'Unerringly well written, and engrossing to the last page.' Lionel Shriver"

Arena
‘0ne of the most exciting - and relevant - books of the last year. Booker material, for sure.'

Financial Times, ‘Novels of 2006’
‘Simon Ings’ ambitiously genre-defying novel is a virtuoso display of imaginative plotting’

Customer Reviews

Intriguing - but confusing
The characters and their lives are intriguing. The descriptions of formative incidents are fascinating and very readable. However, piecing together who everyone is and their relationship to each other is hard work - and frequently confusing.
Don't read this leisurely! Put the book down for a day or two and you soon forget who you're reading about. New people & places are introduced with seeming randomness and names are used so sparingly that you maybe unsure which character you are following. Three-quarters of the way through the book and I still had no idea where we were going.
It is a very frustrating read - nevertheless, the people, incidents and descriptions I met along the way were intriguingly memorable and the images stayed with me long after I finished the book.

Overwritten, underwhelming
The blurb on the back cover of this book says it's "jaw-dropping", "breathtaking". One reviewer went so far as to say it was a new "heart of darkness". I suppose I should have been suspicious when I read that. These comments show how slack literary reviewers and publishers have become, when they are comparing Conrad's masterpiece, his analysis of the psychology of the scramble for Africa, with this particular offering.

Frankly, The Weight of Numbers is garbage. Simon Ings can write English (hence the star), but the plot is contrived, the language is overblown and the imagery superflous. Also, Ings has a drearily predictable obsession with describing sex in intimate detail, to no overall purpose, as far as I can tell. Like a hyperactive four-year old his narrative and temporal structure jumps about all over the place. Not that I'm averse to fragmented authorial technique, but Ings isn't able to use these "innovations" to discuss anything meaningful or interesting.

Like a number of modern authors, he's more interested in the style and structure of his work than grappling with important themes. Allow me to quote an example. Here one of the narrators desribes the house he lived in for a couple of years:
"The Edwardian building, its weak side-wall supported on a timber frame like a man on crutches, stood in a complicated geographical relationship with the feedlanes and towers of the half-built motorway"

Or how about this? (describing a paedophile):
"He thinks about her buttocks. Semen leaps acrobatically to splash the decal of his steering wheel... his spermy fingers slip off the catch, reminding him to fasten his fly. He yanks up the zip".

This is pretty typical of the gratuitous, cheap style that Ings uses. If you like it, read the book. This type of complacent and pretentious writing does nothing for me - it's typical of a postmodern vanity that insists that a stylised mode of expression can make up for the absence of a properly worked out set of themes.
I hate it and I confess that after 320 pages of this book (422 pages), I gave up. Fortunately, there are plenty of books I've still not read by Dostoevsky, Hardy, a few Dickens, Eliot, some Zola, Balzac, Trollope, Fielding, Fitzgerald, Waugh, Greene, Murdoch, Burgess, Carter, Atwood etc. so I don't think my life will be poorer for not reading any more of the type of rubbish Ings has written in The Weight of Numbers.

Flawed genius
The novel follows a number of carefully interleaved stories over sixty or more years as the various characters lives intertwine in ways that would baffle even Dickens. Each of the characters is engaging, and each of the stories is interesting - ranging from child kidnapping; people trafficking; the loneliness of homosexuality during the War; east African civil war - but there doesn't seem to be a common thread to hold them together. There is something missing.

The title, The Weight of Numbers, offers no clues. One of the characters likes maths but there doesn't seem to be much logic to the name. Neither is there a particular logic to the titles of each of the stories - one or two are made obvious but most remain enigmatic.

The writing, though, is beautiful. Simon Ings conjours a perfect sense of time and place, whether the place is Mozambique on a dusty afternoon in the 1980s or middle England in the 1960s. Each word rings with beauty, but the text never seems overblown or stodgy. Most stories are told with perfect clarity, but the difficulty is remembering which of the characters interrelated in previous stories - which may or may not be in the chronological past. The exception to this is the fate of Stacey, the ex-Grange Hill star. Stacey's story is probably the least satisfying, not least because she is too easily confused with Melissa Wilks, who played Samuel Maguire's girlfriend in the real Grange Hill series. Stacey didn't ring true, and her chaotic life seemed to flit across continents rather too easily.

I enjoyed the novel. It was pacey, political, had enough action but with (mostly) excellent characterization and detail. It felt satisfying to read - but the hollowness came as it started to unravel so soon after finishing the work. I'd say there are plenty of books less deserving of our time. There is genius, but I'm afraid it is flawed.