This is really fucking strange. In-depth analysis there I know, but my point stands: it's just really, really strange. I don't actually know if I like it. Tentacle is ambitious and interesting and complex and it's deeply original. It's also not very pleasant. Nearly all the characters are arseholes, and there's not a whole lot of characterisation beyond that. It's post-apocalypse and climate change and ocean conservation, which are all things that I like, but it's also time travel and pirates and, well, people being arseholes, and those things I always find a much harder sell. It takes careful reading to follow the plot, which I like, but structure and concept, in the absence of a character I can give a damn about isn't enough. That absence might, in another book, be mitigated by the emotion evoked by environment - such as the dying ocean at the centre of this book - but the affect of that particular absence is so flat here that it doesn't really compensate.

I really don't know. I think I'm going to have to mull it over and perhaps read it again before I can come to a real conclusion here. And that's a conclusion that's interesting in itself. I read a lot, and there aren't many books that I read and bounce off so hard I can't even tell what I think about them. Usually I either like a book or I don't, or I can articulate a general level of indifference. My response to Tentacle, however, is wholly ambiguous, and that's honestly kind of fascinating.