I have a strict rule that I must read a book cover to cover (or watch a movie start to finish) before I post a review in these pages. It's part of my implicit contract with my readers. This is why I read the entirety of Calista's ill-conceived "bike lane" trilogy. It is why I watched all 16 hours of Sarang's n Things I Hate About You. It is why I haven't posted a review of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and probably never will.
And yet I feel compelled to break my rule and review Dave's latest effort despite having read far less than 1% of it. The reason is simple: Dave has simultaneously published 10 million detective novels, and even if I could read them at a rate of 100 per day, I could not finish a third of them before dying. Clearly an exception was called for.
As you will have guessed, Dave didn't actually write 10 million books. Or at least, not directly. The novels were procedurally generated using an algorithm that Dave "trained" on the collected works of Agatha Christie. Dave claims not to have edited the results at all, or even to have read very many of them. (This raises the bizarre possibility that I have read more of Dave's books than Dave has.)
The books themselves, at least the ones I read, were highly enjoyable, featuring plenty of unconventional plot twists but never straying far from the eminently satisfying formula that Christie perfected. Pleasingly, there seem to be plenty of Poirot mysteries, which have always been my favorites.
However clever the plot, though, it was seldom difficult to identify the murderer, at least after reading two or three of the books. It is not that the identity of the killer is always the same—the murderer might be almost anyone, from an over-the-hill chess genius, to a willowy débutante, to a surgeon with a deadly secret. But Dave programmed the algorithm so that the murderer is always given the same name—"the Great War" or "World War I." The other characters blithely use these names, giving no indication that they are in any way out of the ordinary. This can be quite confusing when the actual war is discussed.
Needless to say, the consequence is that the books do not quite match Christie's capacity to surprise. But of course this is the point. As the books go on, one after another, the Great War's death toll rises, and the ridiculous number of books hammers home the sheer enormity of the disaster. (By the way, you may have noticed that the number of novels doesn't match the actual death toll from World War I, which was about 17 million. My theory is that this is because there are sometimes multiple murders in a single book.)
Shortly after publication, it emerged that several libraries had set up their acquisition systems automatically to order Dave's books upon publication, and the resulting delivery attempts were astonishing, with fully loaded trucks lined up for dozens of miles. Overnight, Dave became the best-selling author of all time, and his books now account for more than 6% of the Library of Congress and more than half of the Harvard library.
Those statistics get more and more stunning the longer you think about them. The Harvard library is a massive compendium of human knowledge, but it would take more than half of it to devote even a slim novel to each victim of World War I. (I say "would take" because Dave's books don't describe the actual victims, whose personalities are almost entirely lost to history. It merely gestures at the scale of the project if one were to attempt to do so.) And each of those victims was fully human, imbued with character and passions and personality, so that one doubts whether a single book would be enough to capture the individual in full. And then the true horror of the war forces itself into your awareness, in a way that it has never done before.
