This Town Will Never Let Us Go is unapologetically a product of it’s time. This is the book’s glorious secret weapon and its greatest flaw. Prepare for a book that has aged, both well and otherwise. I don’t even know how to begin to dissect the “Black Man” character in it. Though, to be fair, judging from his recent interview, Miles doesn’t seem particularly proud of that bit either.

But yes, a product of its time. We will start there. We live in a world where much of this book can be readily discounted, and yet, much of it rings true. The War on Terror is over and it’s going. Celebrities no longer live in a space where statements can take them down. You can say anything these days — would Tiffany be cancelled today? Kanye West has said worse, and he still has his circles, as depraved as they may be. We live in a world that’s just as bitter as Miles prophesied and also absolutely nothing like it. Now you can be on every screen in the world more than ever. Videotape is gone, we live in the world of the phone, not the television. But This Town Will Never Let Us Go is no mere cultural artifact. The totality of the culture once is still part of the totality of the culture today, from a certain lens. We live in an era of nostalgia. Of course the Faction are well in tune with Yesteryear. The Executive these days just runs a streaming service.

The one flaw here, ignoring the beautiful clever ideas and searingly well crafted narrative is how damn bitter it is. My fiction doesn’t need to be happy, (hell, you can check my writing for all sorts of misery) but This Town Will Never Let Us Go is written from the perspective of an enormous cynic, a person not even close to liking the world. Miles writes about, near the end of the book, how we don’t even know the people we care about. How we are merely in love with the idea of them. It is a solipsistic, self important and downright pathetic view. He backs it up with pretty words, but there are plenty other views like it in the book. Extremely well written terrible opinions. I believe the most essential human emotion is the feeling of hope — and this is, at times, a hopeless experience. I could say, if I cared for extremes, that the book is like it’s own Waco Black. It takes great pleasure in being unpalatable.Taking this analogy to its own extreme, it also means this book is shooting itself in the face.

But equally, it’s awfully hard to get too caught up in the negative aspects of a book this engrossing, this charming. Even if you disagree, even if you disagree constantly, it will still be hard to not turn the page in rapture at Miles’ talent. The book is excessively entertaining. For a book with such misery and fatalism, it also takes its time to put stuff like Bastard Raccoon in it. For every bit you scowl in indignation at, there’s a bit about videotape’s insidiousness which is the truest thing ever written. Every once in a while, everything clicks, and this is the best book ever written. But would the Faction really want it that way? There is no merit in a “flawless book” after all. It leaves no room for adjustments.

There is certainly more “purpose” transcribed here than pretty much every other Who thing under the sun. Certainly this is what I would call “arthouse” Who. Lawrence Miles had things to say. How we interpret them, what we decide is true and untrue, that can at times be an added benefit, depending on the person you are. Though, yeah. This book can also be agonizing. I would love a different ending please.

This book, before the advent of the Kindle and the handheld PDF reader, was electrical, a circuit board, constantly pulsing in one minute bursts. Paragraph after paragraph. For a book about patterns, ritual, it carves you into that ritual. Immersive, beautifully done, This book is exquisite — and it’s also endlessly frustrating, brimming with things I could nitpick for days on end. This review could go on forever, really. I feel passionately about damn near every section of the book. The flaws, the beauty. They’re both NUMEROUS. You will not find apathy here. This Town won’t let you go, no matter how you feel about all of it.

Isn’t that the main thing?

[My opinions have changed somewhat since writing this review. Scroll to the bottom for clarification.]

This Town Will Never Let Us Go by Lawrence Miles: the first proper Faction Paradox novel. Following up on The Book of the War, a vast, universe- and timeline-spanning encyclopedia filled to the brim with dives into Earth's history and a litany of confusing and creative sci-fi concepts, you'd expect a suitably large-scale and complex story to kick off the novel range proper. Instead, Miles chooses to gun for the small-scale. This is a book which focuses on the actions and thoughts of three people in a small town across the span of six hours. The way the book connects to Faction mythos becomes increasingly clear as the plot goes on, but the Faction itself always keeps its distance from the plot.

It's whiplash, but the small-scale vibe works great in and of itself. The three plot threads the book follows are all very interesting – my personal favorite was the character arc of Tiffany Korta, a surprisingly-sympathetic pop star on a quest to find herself. Her arc was oddly relatable – feels sorta trans-coded – and the idea of someone whose media self is becoming sentient was fascinating to me. The thread about Inangela's quest to perform a ritual was a little meandery, but the characters were fun enough, and if nothing else Inangela's journey worked because of the atmosphere alone – that of a lonely War-torn town, which is written impeccably. Like, the vibes of this book are great, and they carry each plot thread even at points when the plot itself is less than engaging. Which brings me to the terrorist paramedic Valentine, perhaps the least interesting of the three... his arc was the most straightforward, and there wasn't much personality to him. Still, sheer intrigue about what his plans were kept the momentum going there. Every plot thread had something going for it.

The narration style is something that folks seem to be divided on – either you love or hate Lawrence Miles's snarky commentary in the way he tells this story. Personally, I was a big fan, and found the style helped keep things engaging and approachable, in the character/plot-driven segments and otherwise. Miles often goes into asides where he waxes philosophical about society, culture, and the media, which for the most part worked, as they intertwined with the plot and added another layer to proceedings. And while I didn't agree with everything, some of his musings had me genuinely reframing the way I looked at the nature of the world.

God, though. The ending. As this book neared its end, Miles became increasingly blatant about his cynical views on society and its future that I just could not connect to in the slightest. I just found the words "okay, okay, we get it, shut up now" rolling around my head... perhaps it's a cultural divide, seeing as I was born in the early 2000s and thus wasn't around for the post-9/11 cultural landscape that this book was written in. Miles's perspective on society as having been shut down by good taste in the face of catastrophe seems in direct contrast with modern internet culture where if anything, people are too vocal. I simply didn't get to experience the era of pop culture that created this book, and that might well be its undoing for me – and in fact I'd pay money to see a version of This Town that takes into account modern cultural trends like social media and generative AI. Even if it had the same cynicism, the more modern perspective on culture might connect with me personally more. (or would that just make Miles's rambles more obnoxious...?)

The cynicism the book espouses bleeds into the plot, where everything seems to end in failure. Valentine doesn't make an impact, and the bombing of the buried TARDIS instead destroys culture and meaning forever, which also happens to sabotage Inangela's own goals. Tiffany is the only one to get people talking, but her core-self is nowhere to be seen and her media-self has become a self-aware villain gleefully advocating for murder. It's a total downer, where none of the characters you cared about get a good ending. I feel punished for caring about the characters. And, like... I don't even mind bad endings in service of strong messaging, but when said messaging feels more like blind cynicism than anything else, it loses me. At least it could've painted itself as a criticism only of contemporary society, in which case it would've been a lot more digestible – but no, our culture is doomed forever and ever, and whatever hope there was for change has been near-destroyed, and that's the book. It's just tiring.

I don't know what to rate this. On one hand there's so much of the book I liked, but I feel like even that's not faultless, because in retrospect it was leading towards this ending all along. Everything was in service of it. But looking at it as a whole, I'll go with a very tentative 3.5/5, because I was hooked for long enough to make reading this more than worth it. I'm a Tiffany Korta stan now, great job guys.

Some unorganized thoughts:

• The way this book depicts a TARDIS interior is cool as f**k. Miles's brand of conceptual sci-fi f**kery was on full display there and it was glorious.
• I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else mention that, evocative as his scenes were, the Black Man's depiction feels pretty sketchy from a representation standpoint. Ooo scary african man!!
• The ending kinda lost me with the apparitions of Horror and Tiffany in the Ship, and the version of Tiffany that murdered the reporter. Wouldn't mind an explanation, maybe it would shed some light on some parts of the book I was frustrated with.

EDIT: After a couple months spent idly pondering on this book's ending and discussing it with others, I've come around to it a lot. I'm still a bit disappointed by the cynicism, and the generally negative ending for the characters, but when you look at certain aspects of how society changed in the 21st century, Miles isn't all wrong. And even if his take on society differs from mine in some ways, I can't entirely fault him for saying something I disagree with. My score for this book will probably continue to jump around over time, because it still stands that I'm pretty conflicted about it, and personal enjoyment counts for a lot in my scores; this note is just to say that if I were to write this review over again, I would be a little more receptive to Miles's takes, and to the book as a whole.

Every author begins writing a book with the intent of giving their audience a message. This may be a political statement, or something deep that forces you to learn something about yourself. This Town Will Never Let Us Go by Lawrence Miles is no exception as there are three key messages that are present throughout the whole book.

1. Lawrence Miles hates you
You, the reader, are an idiot. You're an idiot for ever picking up and reading the book and you're an even bigger idiot for thinking you could ever enjoy it. The sheer density of the text on every page seems daunting enough, but when those words actually begin to form a sentence, you realise that this man writes with a degree of cynicism that almost seems derogatory. The concepts, themes and commentary on things such as celebrities, the media and war aim to touch on every relevant issue of society in as few words as possible, making something that's so profoundly interesting but so tough to read. Lawrence Miles hates you but it's a kind of tough love. He wants you to see the world from his perspective, which brings me to his second message.

2. Lawrence Miles hates himself and this book
It sounds strange but there's no other way to describe it. His cynicism covers not only his views of the world, but also of his characters. Our first impression of the protagonist Inangela is that "the news wouldn't quite know how to describe her if she was murdered", in reference to her age. This kind of writing comes off a little weird and frankly wrong at times, with his attemps to critiscise how women are viewed in the media sounding just plain sexist at times, not to mention him naming an arms dealer 'the black man'. This makes it difficult for me to take his views and comments on society seriously, as while I don't know him or his beliefs personally, it definitely feels like he has some unresolved prejudices.
To call his writing style and view of his own characters and plot negative and condescending would be a harsh understatement, as right from the start it's evident we're not supposed to like everything he says. Valentine is depicted as a literal terrorist, desperate to involve himself somehow in the War, and the media version of Tiffany goes off the rails, talking about how much she loves murder while the original one disappears. To call everything Miles says 'commentary' just wouldn't do the book justice, as it really feels like he hates what he's writing at times, making the whole thing feel like some edgy teenage boys diary after he's just found the wikipedia page for 'depression'.

I have a love-hate relationship with this book. I think Lawrence Miles is a genius, with some genuinely interesting and insightful things to say about just anything and everything. I was invested in the characters and the plot, and the world building of this little town in the short span of six hours is just wonderful. However I struggle to see past some of the poor and borderline not-ok things he says about some of his own characters that reflect his own supposed world-views, meaning a 7/10 feels like an apt rating for this book.

3. You probably thought I forgot the third message didn't you?
The most important message Miles wants to give us, is that he really, really hates the muppets (which is perfectly understandable to be honest).

7/10