I Am Radar

A frustrating read, this one. Captivating in parts, slow and dragging in others. It's ostensibly the story of a group of avant-garde puppeteers who tour war zones, but it is also furnished with a terrific amount of backstory. There's a theme of duality and the problems of observation as expressed in quantum physics (think Schrodingers Cat) running throughout the book, but it wanders into view for a couple of paragraphs and then submerges for dozens of pages, as if the author has suddenly remembered to drop it back in. It's not a terrible book by any means, but it also holds the seeds of a much better one that hasn't quite come off.