The Spiral by Iain Ryan

 

Erma Bridges is an academic in Brisbane in the Centre for Creative Writing and Cultural Understanding. She's interested in Choose Your Own Adventure stories, having read the books as a child, and is writing a book for an academic publisher on the subject. For this reason she employed a research assistant, Jenny Wasserman, to contact a reclusive writer, Archibald Moder, who’s a founder of the genre. But Jenny is unreliable and prickly, and just when Erma is at the end of her tether, she goes missing. One night Jenny turns up, but she's agitated and distressed, and in Erma's house armed with a gun. After trying to murder Erma, but injuring her gravely, Jenny kills herself.

When the hospital discharges Erma after a long convalescence, she travels to Thailand to recuperate, where she indulges in her passion for Muay Thai. But eventually she has to come home to Australia to pick up her career. When she does, she looks into the circumstances of Jenny's breakdown. This she does while trying to pick up the research Jenny had been working on, not least by finding a dictaphone she used to record interviews, including with Archibald Moder.

Throughout the novel there are alternating chapters told from Erma's point of view and that of Sero, a barbarian from a Choose Your Own Adventure story. For a good half of the book, the two threads are separate. 

This is a brave and innovative novel. The publishers put a big marketing campaign behind it prior to publication, with viral marketing on social media and emailed clues; they billed it as like nothing the reader would have experienced before and a brilliant novel. Now I've read it, I have to confess to being in two minds. For the first half of the novel, I enjoyed the Erma chapters but found the Sero chapters an irritating distraction. I'm not a massive fantasy reader myself and thought this might be why.

But then, around the halfway mark, the Sero chapters intertwined with Erma's storyline and took on a much greater significance. There's one part of the book which the author writes entirely from Sero's perspective and as a Choose Your Own adventure, complete with the reader deciding what Sero will do. I've read some reviewers who found this off-putting, but I enjoyed it, and the author didn't keep it going for too long before switching back to a traditional narrative.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It was experimental and a little out there, but it worked and kept my interest. I congratulate the publisher for taking a risk on this title and backing it to the extent they did, because it's not every day you read something like this. I found the first half took a while to get into and the fantasy element didn’t always work, but this is an intriguing novel and well worth a read.

3 out of 5 stars