About Middlegame by James Warner

            (First, check out Middlegame by James Warner)

            It’s odd to like a story when all you can think about as you read it are the things you don’t like, the things that don’t sound right or don’t make sense. It’s odd, but it happens.         

            Here, for example, I couldn’t shake a feeling of dissonance. Like the protagonist’s thoughts and speech didn’t quick line up with how everyone acted around him. Almost as though the story was written originally in Russian and important implications of certain words and actions were lost in translation. It’s tough to describe, and for all we know this could have been intended. Certainly the plain, almost simple nature of the language lends itself to a kind of “translated” feeling. Regardless, it bugged me a bit, but it didn’t stop me from moving forward. I still wanted to find out what would happen.

            So I read on, and at one point I tabbed away to make a note to complain about vaguely defined relationship between the main character and his wife. But, I’ll tell you, now I think that’s the only relationship in the story that really truly works. He only mentions his wife a couple times, but we never meet her and we don’t learn anything about her or their relationship except that he doesn’t seem to conflicted about sleeping with someone else, and it didn’t take long for him to resolve to defect and leave forever. With only that information, though, we have a general picture of a relationship in which those truths exist, but we don’t have any of that dissonance arising from specific interaction. We can fill that in with stuff that doesn’t feel just a tiny bit off or sudden. More than anything else, I think that worked.

            So, I understand why anyone would publish this story. You can’t help but be intrigued by the setting, the basic ideas in the plot, the ideas of any of the characters (on paper, haha, a professional, Jewish, Soviet chess player considering defection to Israel ought to have come off more interesting). The problem is that so much of the story just felt wrong somehow. Too sudden, or too robotic.

            The problem, though, with that problem is that I still like this story. And I can’t really put my finger on why.