Slow River by Nicola Griffith

Slow River by Nicola Griffith
Ballantine Books, 1995.

Overview: Slow River, winner of a Lambda Literary Award in 1996, follows the life of Lore van de Oest, a young woman whose pedigree means that she is absurdly wealthy and educated in her family’s “bioremediation” technology. After barely surviving a kidnapping, she is taken in by Spanner, a woman who is perfectly content making a living through crime. While the book begins with Lore’s decision to go “straight” (don’t worry, she still loves ladies, though that is not a huge focus of the book), it constantly flips between the four distinct phases of her life: childhood, the kidnapping, her years with Spanner, and her ongoing attempt to start earning an honest living, albeit under an assumed identity.

My reaction: I feel compelled to start this off with a warning to potential readers that a major part of the story is sexual abuse and rape. It’s not an easy read, to be sure, but putting aside the rape and abuse for a moment, it’s got a lot of my favorite scifi elements: start with a dystopic world that doesn’t seem too far-fetched (i.e., each citizen has an identity chip inserted in the web between their thumb and forefinger), add a mystery, political intrigue, interesting technology (Griffith really goes to town with this one, as she describes in great detail the waste treatment technology that the van de Oest family essentially has a monopoly on), and make it a female protagonist (if she’s a lesbian, bonus points!).

I was pleasantly surprised by how elegantly the plotlines intersected, although I really shouldn’t have been, given that I appreciated Griffith’s skill with story in her other two books (The Blue Place and Ammonite) before picking up Slow River. Her supporting characters felt a little two-dimensional at times, but that could be a manifestation of having a character who was afraid to really engage with them. That said, it didn't keep me from turning the pages and counting the minutes to my lunch break so I could read more. (A review on Ammonite is forthcoming--I loved it, but was too lazy to write a review, and now it's been so long I feel like I should reread it.) Ultimately, however, I think it falls into the high end of my decent category for science fiction, especially when I compare it to Ammonite, which I will definitely recommend. 

More on the rating:  I'm finding that it's much easier to find high quality lesbian science fiction and fantasy than mystery, which is why I gave Griffith's mystery The Blue Place a rating of recommended when I read it. It was a hard decision not to extend the same leeway to Slow River, but in the end, the characters (with the exception of Lore) were just not as real to me as the whole cast of Ammonite.