Review: Haze

Haze by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I have read a little over a quarter of the book and have decided to stop and the reason is that the only motivation to go on is to get an answer to the mystery of the planet Haze and to me that’s not enough.
My main problem with the book is that almost a hundred pages in I still haven’t connected with the main character. I know what he does for a living, which is to infiltrate different cultures to find breaches to rules laid down by the dominant culture, but I don’t know who he is and what drives him and to me this isn’t enough. It might have been easier to get immerged in the story if it hadn’t jumped between two different timelines, presumably to highlight differences and similarities between the societies that the main character Keir Roget is sent into. I don’t object to the time jumping per say, but without the emotional tie to the character the frequent change in context becomes jarring.
I speak, read and write English fluently, but it’s still only my second language and there are a few sections early in the book where neuwords (where two ‘current’ words are merged together) are used. These aren’t that uncommon in science fiction, so this isn’t specific to this book, but the use of neuwords are still annoying to someone that hasn’t been speaking English their whole life. It requires that the reader either stop and think through what the origin of the word is and what the new word means or to push through and ignore the word and thereby lose some of the meaning/context of the situation.
The last of my objections is that the beginning is almost completely devoid of action and personal interaction. There is a lot of walking, watching and not much else in the first part of the book and as I’ve already mentioned there isn’t enough in it for me to find out what happens later on in the book.



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