Reif Larsen: I Am Radar

Reif Larsen: I Am Radar

7 May 2015

I was in the CBD 3 weeks ago and did my usual, browsing the new books section in Dymocks bookstore. I was taken by this book and what it promised on the back cover. As a former physics graduate, I have always had an interest in quantum physics and the premise sounded interesting. The book, published this year (2015), is hot off the presses and is the follow up book to Larsen's inaugural novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.

Here is the back cover blurb:

A kaleidoscopic, epic novel about a lovestruck radio operator who discovers a secret society…

In 1975, a black child is mysteriously born to white parents. His name is Radar Radmanovic. Falling in with a secretive group of puppeteers and scientists who stage performances in war zones around the world, he is soon forced to confront the true nature of his identity. 

Though Radar is raised in suburban New Jersey, his story rapidly becomes entangled with events stretching from Belgrade in a time of siege to arctic Norway, from Cambodia in the years before the murderous Khmer Rouge regime to the modern-day Congo. 

It explores the furthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history and human experience. It's also about one man, one family and how far you may need to travel to know yourself.

I Am Radar is greater than all of its remarkable parts, a breathtaking, highly addictive joyride that finally arrives at a place of wonder.

Well, it's certainly breathtaking and sprawling in its 656 pages, jumping from one biography to another as it interweaves the journeys of a number of gifted people in different times, all bound together by their work as puppeteers, staging electro-robotic events in war zones. But the ultimate idea behind why they do this and how it is related to quantum physics is lost on me. I think that the GoodReads rating of 3.5 stars out of 5 is about right. In my opinion, the great idea behind the book just overreaches itself a bit - the end in particular leaves so much unanswered - but then, that was perhaps the idea of the author anyway!

Anyway, I was taken enough by the story to log onto the Moreland Library and place a hold on Larsen's inaugural novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet which I now intend to read. More on that at a later time.