Weaveworld

When I started reading it, at first I was deeply engaged in Clive Barker's Weaveworld. By about halfway through the 700+-page book, I was reading it just to finish it. This is a tale about a vast and magical wonderland housed in a tapestry-like carpet. An intriguing notion, but Barker doesn't allow a reader to spend much time there. Cities and shrines and other places in Weaveworld are said to be the most glorious and magical places that ever existed, and then they are glossed over in a brief paragraph or two. Barker's Weaveworld characters are also somewhat bland and forgettable, with one or two exceptions, which was problematic when they were reintroduced, after a hundreds-of-pages hiatus, with no more than a name. On more than one occasion I had to flip back to the early pages of the book to remember just who I was reading about. There are some good descriptions of magic and monsters and the few locales Barker decides to linger over. The ending is satisfying enough. But for a big novel about a vast fantasy world, the experience of reading it was rather thin; much surface, very little depth. Although I didn't outright hate the book, for me it became primarily an exercise in perseverance and endurance, and a way to inoffensively and eventually weary myself enough to fall back to sleep on long insomnia nights.