This Eden by Ed O’Loughlin

​         Why aren’t more people reading this book? Let this (the first review on GR) change that. Mind you, this wasn’t an obvious choice for me either, I’m not exceptionally into technothrillers and I’m really not into spy fiction, I don’t normally commit 400 pages of reading to a book by an unknown author and yet there was something very intriguing about this book and I’m so glad I put reservations aside and decided to try it.
    The technothriller aspect comes into the plot pretty much straight away, one of the characters, Alice, gets involved with starting up a new kind of cryptocurrency. Michael, her boyfriend, isn’t really into it, isn’t on the same tech savvy or social conscience level to really get into it, but then the events decide things for him. Alice dies, Michael gets recruited to work for a tech giant named Fess and then once again recruited by an Irish spy named Aoiffe to work for a suspicious puppetmaster of a man named Towse. Cue in a globetrotting adventure, serpentine intrigue, taut suspense, the forever changing powers that be and endless manipulation, scheming and sneaking around that one normally associates with spy fiction and voila, this not so Edenic world comes to life in all of its confusingly exciting splendor.
   And lo and behold, I really liked it. Might be the first spy book I ever did. The writing certainly had a lot to do with it, from the get go it draws you in with this omniscient perspective done by an unknown narrator. This perspective seems to be accumulated through various data, which is clever in that it immediately establishes the tone for the story, factual instead of emotional, observed instead of experienced, dispassionate in a way and yet strangely compelling at the same time. This remove allows the book to rely on pure plot drivers, requiring structure where every action drives the narrative forward, even as the characters may go around in loops and spirals. But it doesn’t (though it easily might have) leave the character development by the wayside.
    In fact, in Michael and Aoiffe you get two very interesting leads, outsiders both though in completely different ways, one raised off the grid by foreign exiles in Canada just wants to have a quiet life, one is a young woman from Ireland who is looking for the right sort of excitement and danger and meaning in her life to make things interesting. And Towse…well, Towse is mainly unknowable as a proper spy master ought to be.
    Once the action kicks into high gear, it moves along with all the terrible and awesome gravity of an avalanche, one country to the next, one adventure to the next, one revelation to the next. Until it all so cleverly comes together at the end.  
    Don’t know if it made me a spy fiction convert or a technothriller fan, but then again it didn’t have to. Because really good books delight irrespective of genre boundaries.  And this is a really good book. I enjoyed it very much and it read surprisingly quickly for its size. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.