Wolves by Simon Ings

Wolves Reviews

• 
  Nicky

  I got a surprising amount of the way into this when I realised that I really couldn’t care less, because it spends so much time looping round itself, I was too busy trying to figure out what some of the sentences even meant. I returned the copy I had to the library, so I can’t quote one, but there were plenty of sections where I felt that the point was not to get across a point, but to be flowery and pretentious. Eh. I kept waiting for the “terrifying thriller” parts to kick in; the brilliant new technology described in the summary and whatever would make the book stand out.
  
  A third of the way in, I was still waiting, and meanwhile I was hanging around with characters who seemed opaque, pointless, uncaring and not worth caring about. There’s a line or two here and there that does work — the concept of falling in love, first, with the world a person inhabits, the things they surround themselves with, and then with the person. Or not. But, eh. Not interested in simply contemptible characters, and I didn’t feel pity or interest or anything else for them.
  
  
  Originally posted here.
• 
  Rob

  ...Wolves is a bit of an odd novel. It contains elements of a techno-thriller, murder mystery and apocalyptic tale without actually being any of those three. Even several days after finishing it I'm not quite sure what to make of it. The last part of the novel, where I started to get a sense of where things were going, was quite a good reading but if I hadn't promised someone I'd review it, I'm not sure I'd have made it that far. I guess it is a novel that requires a bit of patience and some reflection because after mulling over it for a couple of days, I do think it is a decent read. Maybe not giving into the urge to put a novel down is not such a bad thing once in a while.
  
  
  Full Random Comments review
• 
  fromcouchtomoon

  On the surface: Listless postmodern male anti-hero, unrequited love, complex abandonment issues. Where's the SF?
  In the depths: Narrative and thematic magic, brilliant tomorrow- to near-future visions. SO GOOD. Future classic.
• 
  Hazel Benson

  This novel is so good for so many reasons.
  
  The slight positioning of the science fiction genre it sits in is just in the near distance so as to be close to reality; this makes it a believable bit of fiction to appreciate. My partner is really into augmented reality so this acted as a nice bridge to his world for a little while, like wearing the AR glasses whilst reading this book. This whole aspect of distorted reality, I thought, was an interesting and quite scary concept, which had me wondering all the while what things we the readers were experiencing as really happening and what things were pure fiction.
  
  I particularly enjoyed the middle of the book, so without spoiling things, lets say the event of the body in the car. This was pure genius storytelling. I was completely riveted here. This section of the book just flew by and I felt all the anxiety the character felt in his position and his dealings with the body. This impressive bit of reading gave way then for my expectations for the rest of the book to a complex detective story, which it was in some ways, but really this book is so many other things it really can't be pinned down and pigeonholed so easily.
  
  I also really loved the image of Conrad's Dad placing his collection of toy soldiers all over the hotel, which became a mirroring of the very real wounded soldiers who ended up there.
  
  So I guess with all these good points why only 3 stars? Well, I suppose it all comes down to my own personal feelings. I found some the language some of the time to be overly complicated where more simplistic descriptions would have worked better for me. I appreciate that this writer, whose works I've never read before has probably discovered this is his voice and his way of doing things, but sometimes it felt like picking the onions of the pizza, would have preferred it without. For that it lost something for me. Secondly, I found the characters kind of flat. We see everything through Conrad's eyes (which fits with the AR plot very well) but we lose that insight into the others which I often find so endearing. There is little sympathy here. The main character is resigned to everything that happens to him. His relationship failure, his two near death experiences, his sexual experimentation and ultimately his own shift in growing intimacies. He seems quite lifeless. Nothing seems to really move him to any real emotion. With this in mind, and as a person who feels so much, I found him hard to understand and I guess I didn't have a lot of fun travelling around with him. In Conrad's view, we fall in love with a person's world when we fall in love. I guess I didn't fall in love with conrad or his world. I enjoyed segments of time with him in his past and the technological advancement of his present, whilst bracing myself its very possible threat in our future.
  
  
• 
  Caroline Mersey

  Wolves, by Simon Ings, is a strange novel. In a blog post, the author has explained that it is part memoir, which is a helpful way of looking at it. The story follows Conrad, an advertising and tech pioneer, and follows three broad themes of his life: his relationship with his childhood best friend and later collaborator, his confrontation of the traumatic events surrounding the disappearance of his mother during his childhood, and his development and exploitation of new Augmented Reality technology.
  
  There are some interesting aspects to the novel. I enjoyed the articulation of Conrad's relationship with his friend Michel and the exploration of his mother's mental illness. Though at times I found the literary fiction-style depiction of their friendship treatment of these issues to be a little too knowing and cynical. I struggled to gain an emotional connection to the characters.
  
  There were some clever parallels between the technology Conrad's father was working on to help blinded servicemen and the AR technology Conrad later comes to work on. We canter round the philosophical question of whether what we see, feel and hear is truly 'real' when it can be manipulated by direct stimulation of the optical and auditory nerves, and the brain before approaching the much more interesting question of the impact that has on society. As purveyors of alternate realities, Conrad and Michel become responsible for the increasing distancing and alienation of people from each other. It is hinted that the prevalence of this technology and increasing dependence will potentially lead to the unravelling of contemporary society. Such dystopian warnings are not uncommon in fiction, and the fear of the impact of unregulated technology is an established trope in SF. But the themes are never fully developed.
  
  Overall, this is a novel that really didn't hang together well for me. It wasn't sure whether it wanted to be a lit-fic coming of age story, or a post-apocalyptic techno-thriller. In trying to being both I was left unsatisfied.
• 
  Scott

  The story in Wolves concerns two friends, Conrad and Michel, who often played doomsday games as children. Michel retains this outlook into adulthood, writing an apocalyptic novel and intent on building an ark to keep his family safe from the Fall he is convinced is coming. Conrad gets into advertising and from there into "augmented reality," a way of superimposing elements on the real world via special lenses. Conrad's mother, a woman with a history of psychological problems, died when he was fifteen, and he's never known whether it was suicide or might have been murder.
  
  This book has been categorized by the publisher and other sources as science fiction, but despite the near-future technology that comes into play towards the end, it reads more like something A.M. Homes might have written, if she was English. I liked the writing and the parts of the novel, but the whole didn't quite come together for me. And I have no idea why it's called Wolves or why there is one on the cover. Still, I'd be interested in trying something else from this author.
• 
  Imi

  Abandoned at 36%. I can't deal with the tedium any longer.
• 
  Manuel

  «When civilisations collapse, it's because they fall out of joint. They deafen on their own feedback. They can no longer imagine themselves.»
  
  El sexo (ora traumático, ora revelador, siempre naturalizado y heterogéneo; representado como medio, fin y consecuencia inevitable de tantos de nuestros actos), la realidad aumentada (que no virtual) y la crisis de los 40 (exacerbada en su proyección próximo-futurista de esta era de la eterna juventud en la que ya parecemos vivir ahora) emulsionan en la sombría e íntima historia que nos presenta Simon Ings, trufada de fantasías apocalípticas y responsabilidades eludidas.
  
  Donde Christopher Priest la describe como «seria, ambiciosa y perturbadora», otros críticos se apresuran a recomendarnos que hagamos oídos sordos a la etiqueta de ciencia-ficción, que no es una novela de género, que nos la tomemos como una muestra de ficción literaria «a secas» de primera magnitud. Los lectores curados de espantos (y prejuicios) sabrán interpretar dicha recomendación como el acicate definitivo para darle una oportunidad a Wolves. No apta para todos los públicos, en cualquier caso. Ni para todas las ocasiones. No es difícil imaginar que lo descarnado de algunas escenas (más en el plano emocional y afectivo que en el directamente gráfico) pudiera herir según qué sensibilidades.
• 
  Kieren

  Some day I will write a real review of my favourite book.
• 
  Zehavit

  Interesting mesh of genres and great writing . Yet it didn't fully worked for me. Might have been the weather...
• 
  Dark Matter

  Nalini Haynes reviewed this book; for more reviews by Nalini, see
  Nalini Haynes on Dark Matter Zine.
  
  UPDATE: author tweeted a response to this review,
  http://www.darkmatterzine.com/wolves/.
  
  Some spoilers and trigger alert (sexual abuse)
  
  A literary dystopian novel, Wolves focuses on the landscape as allegory for characters while communicating their fear of the Fall of civilisation.
  
  Conrad, the protagonist, continually ponders the canalisation of the landscape, how rivers and train lines are channelled into culverts and canals. This appears to be an allegory for Conrad’s own lack of agency, emphasised by the absurd lengths to which Conrad goes to avoid both conflict and facing the obvious.
  
  Conrad is in love with his best friend Michael. Then Conrad is attracted to Michael’s wife although description of their sex scene reveals Conrad’s underlying motives. Later it appears Conrad may have fallen in love with Michael’s wife; as they say on social media “it’s complicated”.
  
  In the first half of Wolves, technology is in the background while real landscape is in the foreground. At about the half-way mark a side character instigates conflict for the first time; this presages a change in tone of the novel. After this point of conflict, technology takes center stage with the real landscape in the background.
  
  The primary characters still avoid conflict although tension builds while Conrad investigates his mother’s death (at last). This investigation is enmeshed with an incident where a pervert exposed himself to Conrad when Conrad was a teenager; this story is told anew, belatedly expanding to reveal an unlikely story of sexual abuse (more on this soon).
  
  As years pass, characters’ lives become more entwined, more complex and yet they still avoid conflict, avoid the obvious. Eventually the rivers break their banks, flooding overwhelms the canals, symbolic of the Fall of civilisation. Surrealistic destruction of a house parallels the flooding. The Fall was more realised in the landscape than in civilisation or character’s lives and yet their lives changed after the Fall, when passive-aggressive behaviour eventually brings conflict to a low, slow boil before an unsatisfactory ‘resolution’. It could be argued this is like life and yet the point of conflict leading to this resolution is unlikely in real life.
  
  Conrad is an exasperating protagonist, difficult to care about – either love or hate – because he is inconstant, lacking inclination to attempt agency in his own life. While I enjoyed exploration of an unusual sexual triangle, the usual features of such triangles – passion and romance – were notable by their absence. The resolution of the triangle, especially the dialogue during the resolution, was disappointing: an obvious point was forgotten at a crucial time. It may have been a means of avoiding conflict. Again.
  
  Technology
  
  Wolves explores the world leading to Google Glass and beyond but this technology is flawed. Blind men are given vests they wear against their skin to help them see and yet they’re hooked up to cameras and goggles; the function of the vest – apart from a noise-maker intended as a plot device – is never clear. At one stage I thought the vests may have been like a pin sculpture, creating images against the person’s skin, yet this does not fit (goggles plus lying on his back with the vest ‘seeing’ on the back).
  
  Late in the novel Google Glass (never named as such) is developed to manipulate the brain via radio waves, selectively broadcasting sight, sound and sensation directly to one man’s brain in a block of flats. Hacking the Google Glass technology, or at least assuming his personal technology was hacked, would have made more sense. (Feel free to disagree with me in the comments below.)
  
  Evil albino trope
  
  The blind pervert has ‘albino-white hair’. This is emphasised repeatedly; it isn’t until late in the novel that his hair is referred to as ‘shock white’ and this is well after establishing that this guy molested Conrad and probably murdered his mother.
  
  Why albino white? Using albino-imagery to create a sense of ‘other’ in a villain is lazy writing.
  
  If the guy was an albino, he wouldn’t have been placed on the front lines of a war. He would have been a danger to himself and everyone else. If I was in a combat situation, unless the uniforms were markedly different in colour, I wouldn’t be able to tell friend from foe at 20 metres and I have quite good eyesight for an albino. If this character was an albino, he would have been visually impaired before being sent to the front lines and therefore wouldn’t have seen action. If he was blinded and his hair turned ‘shock white’ because of what happened on the front lines then the author has been deeply offensive by emphasising an unwarranted association with a vulnerable, despised minority group.
  
  Vision impairment
  
  A hostel supporting vision impaired men is key to the story. Unfortunately the author does not appear to have researched vision impairment.
  
  Men bump around and get lost in the confines of the hostel but they don’t use mobility canes. Sighted carers watch them yet leave these men alone to suffer indignity and stressful disorientation.
  
  A man who cannot navigate the hostel goes out into a nature reserve with neither clear paths nor safety-rails, using his vest; the same vest that couldn’t help him in the hostel.
  
  This man cannot differentiate between men and women because the images he’s given to masturbate to are only 12 pixel images. This same man can see well enough to recognise Conrad’s mother and mistake Conrad for his mother because Conrad looks so much like his mother. This man can apparently also see well enough to navigate a nature reserve, gauge distance in order to grab and capture a teenage boy after exposing himself to said teenage boy, who has had ample opportunity to run away and hide. Apparently Simon Ings is unfamiliar with the game Blind Man’s Bluff.
  
  Conclusion
  
  Wolves is an entirely unflattering depiction of humanity – people are the wolves – but Ings’s inadequate research into vision impairment coupled with his evil albino trope particularly rankled. The prose was interesting, particularly the use of the landscape as a character. Unfortunately I cared more about the landscape than I did the protagonist whose lack of agency and pathological conflict avoidance sapped the narrative of momentum. Technological developments, from the vests to selective broadcasts, lacked cohesive plausibility. I confess I’m not a huge fan of ‘Literature’ as a genre; readers who enjoy Literature (as opposed to literature or dystopian novels) will probably enjoy Wolves far more than I.
• 
  João Eira

  ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT
  FANTASY LITERATURE
  
  “When we fall in love with someone, we fall in love first with their world. Sometimes love for the person follows. Sometimes not.”
  
  Four pages into Simon Ings‘s newest novel, Wolves, and I am already underlining things with a pencil for their insight into the human psyche, something which, if I am to be honest, I find lacking in many genre novels and am most likely to find in the so called literary novels. Wolves has been hailed as a triumphal return to science fiction by UK-based author Ings, even though the speculative elements which are characteristic of science fiction are sparse and only come into importance toward the final two thirds of the novel. Wolves is at the same time a coming of age tale and a whodunnit story, but even more than those archetypes, it is the story of Conrad and Michel, two childhood friends very different from one another, but whose bond proves durable even when the passage of the years and the inevitable concerns of adulthood weaken their childhood connection.
  
  Conrad is a passive boy that grew up in a nondescript town in what has to be the UK for the gloomy climate that pervades the story. His parents bought a hotel when they got married, and despite all obstacles it has managed to barely maintain its doors open. Conrad’s mother suffers from bouts of mental mania, locking herself in the top floor of the hotel to work on various projects which she is certain will bring financial fortitude to the family but which inevitably prove to be a failure, and, toward the later stages of her life, abandoning her family to join a female-only protest camp near a military base from which she is constantly having to be rescued from due to her inability to take care of herself. It’s a heavy strain weighing the family down, but Conrad and his father have adapted their lives to her manic episodes as best they can, until one day, as she abandons the family once more to join the protest camp, Conrad discovers his mother’s body in the trunk of his father’s car, an apparent suicide.
  
  That first sentence I quoted earlier proves to be the key to decipher the contents of this novel, and why Conrad acts they way he acts. As a boy Conrad is in love with Michel’s world, the world that grew out of Michel having lost his father in combat against an undescribed enemy and compensating that lack of a fatherly influence with a romantic idea of masculinity that manifests itself as a constant preparation, both mentally and phisically, for what he sees as the inevitable end of the world, what he calls The Fall. While Conrad can see through the futility of preparing for the end of times, his love for Michel makes him join Michel’s training and speculation on how the world might come to an end.
  
  Conrad has enough introspective skill, and the honesty needed to go with that, to admit just how in love with a person’s world he is, and not to shy away from problems that arise from having that world suddenly lack the luster that it once had. When we first meet Conrad he has just come out of an accident in which his girlfriend Mandy has lost both her arms, and while he isn’t initially fazed by that change of circumstances, the strain that that loss puts on Mandy brings up certain mental characteristics of her that Conrad does not enjoy, making him realize he isn’t in love with her world anymore, with the seven toothpastes she uses so she can have a different flavor every day of the week, her little blue bottles of essential oils gathering dust on her bathroom shelf.
  
  Falling in love with a person is hard. Falling in love with a world is easy. Confusing the two loves is easier still.
  
  The first hundred pages of Wolves are used solely to explore Conrad’s love for other people’s worlds. Ings does an amazing job at bringing to life his characters, making you, if not fall in love, at least be incredibly sympathetic to Conrad’s predicament, his not entirely cynical worldview but honest and unapologetic. The science fictional elements come into play after those hundred pages, where Ings shows us a near future where Virtual Reality has been replaced by a more pervasive technology, Augmented Reality, which as the novel progresses becomes more and more a commodity, and also a problem. Conrad rides that commoditization when he founds a company with a brilliant engineer from the company he was working at to build and market publicity experiences tailored for AR, which allows him to see first hand the impact the evolution of that technology has in the world. It also brings him closer once more to Michel, as the post-apocalyptic novel he was working on becomes a bestseller, and later on, a media franchise.
  
  Despite the genial characterization and insight of the first third of Wolves, and the interweaving layers of technological change and personal relationships of the second third, the last hundred pages of the novel fail to deliver an ending that satisfies the promises that were laid out before. A plot reveal concerning one character from Conrad’s past feels unrealistic (all things considered), and towards the end Conrad behaves in a way that goes against his character’s previously established beliefs, perhaps taking a bit to the extreme that falling with a person’s world motif. The way the mystery of Conrad’s mother death is also solved unsatisfactorily, even if that plotline never feels as central to the story’s plot as the back copy of the book would led us to believe, or even the technological thriller it is trying to sell. More interestingly, the imagery of the wolves never comes into play, which makes me wonder whether the book should not have been titled “The Flood” or something along those lines.
  
  For all the flaws of the last third of the book, I have to say I felt strangely drawn into Wolves. Even if the plot moving the story forward is fairly nonexistent and badly handled toward the end, the characters and their relationships are strong enough to carry the whole book forward. Ings strikes a interesting balance between being preachy and insightful, and his vision of commoditized AR technology feels plausible enough to believe that that is a possibility in our own world. It might be a book that will not appeal to everyone, but it is an ambitious and insightful novel that shines a light on the relationships we carve in this world, be they love or friendship, without being apologetic for showing things as they truly are. Even taking into account its flaws, Wolves is a remarkable novel.
• 
  Jade Hall

  dnf
• 
  squeakingof

  This was one of the most intriguing books ever and yet it took two years to read but you know what?? That is on ME
• 
  Liviu Szoke

  Reading the first quarter was excruciating. Then, it became easier, something started to happen, some story from the present, not just boring facts from the past. But the end... Ah! the end. Just don't bother with this piece, it is not worthing.
• 
  Liviu

  not really of any interest
• 
  nks

  Wow, this book. The writing is wonderful. The story was a bit different than the cover synopsis had led me to believe, but I was glad it tricked me into reading this. I loved it.
• 
  Emma Victory

  Lack of clarity is not the same thing as ambiguity.
• 
  Lauren Smith

  Some great ideas here about the future of augmented reality tech, with visions of a world where reality is overlaid with more exciting or beautiful images and action. It's what you get when the fledgling tech gets funding from a venture capitalist/movie director who's just made a movie out of a long-winded post-apocalyptic novel and wants to turn it into an AR game in London.
  
  I also liked the parallel flashback narrative in which Conrad grapples with the complicated relationships that still haunt him in adulthood: with his bipolar mother, his long-suffering, bewildered father, and his best friend Michel. Conrad's mother died when he was 15, but he's not sure if her death was a suicide or a murder. He was/is in love with Michel (who goes on to write that long-winded post-apocalyptic novel), and there's some interesting (if tragic) gender play here. Conrad is often referred to as Connie, and he looks almost exactly like his mother, more so when she does his face in makeup. Michel could be pronounced Michael or Michelle.
  
  The various points of interest never fully cohere, though. Wolves is one of those novels that feels 'literary' because it's so restrained, as if being straightforward is considered crass. It's a short novel because it breezes through major changes in society and technology, and keeps its human interactions brief. The reader must fill in the gaps.
  
  To be fair, sci fi is prone to clumsy infodumping, and overexplaining characters' relationships can make a story feel childish. But I think Ings' errs on the side of minimalism, and the book felt lacklustre despite being well written and very, very plausible. Pretty much every character is miserable and the tech is always portrayed as either dystopian or as the drudgery of Conrad's unfulfilling job. It's good but it left me feeling ... tired.
• 
  P. E.

  Simon Ings is an excellent writer. His densely descriptive style reminds me of the likes of James Salter and Elizabeth Jane Howard. However, in my opinion the story is poorly structured. "Wolves" main storyline revolves around a family, the relationship that Conrad has with his parents. As a backdrop to the drama that occurs in this context, the career Conrad goes on to have in the field of augmented reality is relevant. I feel that Ings devotes too much time to the other side of the novel: Conrad's friendship with Michel and the coming of flood waters, which in the end doesn't really seem to add anything more than bleak atmosphere and faraway background to the novel's main events. The two parts are, in fact, easily detached from each other. As a result, at times, and especially in the beginning, "Wolves" doesn't seem to go anywhere. If it wasn't for the intriguing prose I probably would have dropped this book a third of the way through.
• 
  Jason Scott

  I saw Warren Ellis give Simon Ings' the Smoke five stars and that put him on my radar. I couldn't find a copy of the Smoke, but Wolves had such a fantastic cover design that I decided to start there. I *really* wanted to like this book, but after about 40 pages in I just can't take it anymore. It's missing the hook at the beginning that gives you a mystery that you want to see unfold.
  
  The blurb says this is a sci-fi book about augmented reality but I haven't even seen a hint of it yet, so far it's been all backstory and memoir. There's also something about the writing where I keep losing my attention.
• 
  Michelle

  Maybe 2.5 for this one.
  
  There were several plots in this story, which were each very interesting on their own. However, it was difficult to follow as everything was constantly back and forth. Normally I enjoy stories like this very much, but this one was so fragmented and all over the place that I was constantly getting confused shortly after being sucked back into something interesting. Honestly, I'm pretty disappointed because there was a lot of potential had there been more details to tie everything together better.
  
  Thanks to the publisher for this review copy!
• 
  Adam Cordner

  A compelling look at a possible near-future dystopia battered by climate change and intrusive tech. Despite the dark premise, the book is hopeful about humanity's future, affirming that humans will generally choose to help each other even when living on the edge of societal collapse.
  
  The plot delivers on the thriller elements very well. I was constantly looking forward to finding the next piece of the puzzle, and the answers to the mystery were stringed out in a satisfying manner.
• 
  Anastasia Thomason

  What happens when the digital world combines with the real world. In this book, everything is flipped upside down and backwards. You don't know what is real and what isn't. I truly enjoyed reading this book and would read it again and again. It was so interesting to see what was going on and where to look next.
• 
  Siobhan

  Dark and twisty!
• 
  Hayley Dunning

  Feels like a rough first draft.
• 
  Sue Chant

  Dull - got about a third of the way through and gave up. Basically a story about a trivial young man wandering around sponging off people - no discernible SF element.
• 
  Owen Butler

  enjoyed this - actually 3.5 stars
  
  quite well written, interesting storyline
• 
  Sam Hicks

  DNF