The capital city we visit with Grafton contributes to this general feeling of mystery. It has winding, twisting streets with no names, long distances between locations, little traffic, and a constant invasive police presence. At times mystery rises to the level of foreboding (as when Grafton, taking a boat across a large local lake, finds himself in the presence of a rather frightening man dressed all in black). Grafton himself, by the middle of the novel, stalks the streets armed with a gun, carrying a dead woman's somehow animate hand in his pocket — yes, give this man a hand! — and taking on the duties of a police investigator trolling for culprits.
Behind all this stands Grafton's undeterred desire to turn all of his adventures into that first-ever guidebook to this odd and sometimes deadly dangerous domain. He's constantly taking notes and, as he says, "I find that even when something happens to them later having written them down fixes them in my mind. So it is good to take notes, and when they get lost I have not lost the information, usually."
Neither does the reader. Does Grafton survive to turn his discoveries into his long-awaited guidebook? I think so. I hope so. After the intensity of reading his story I felt that I had taken the journey myself, to a place on our own planet in the here and now as bizarre and yet as familiar as anything in Gene Wolfe's galactic fiction. If you thought no one could improve on Kafka, try this one at home.
Read an excerpt of The Land Across