Frank Schätzing: Der Schwarm

It all starts innocently enough: some missing fishermen, some whales acting strange, some strange worms found in the bottom of the ocean. Of course, things start getting serious, when these aquatic troubles spread around the globe and problems get bigger and bigger. Eventually the survival of the whole human race is threatened.

The premise of this book sounds quite exciting. The problem is, the author has spread all the excitement over 911 pages (at least in the Finnish edition), and there's at least 300 pages too much. He spends some time on his main characters, and I didn't care about a single one of them. There's endless lecturing and preaching. I'm sure a skilled script editor will make a really great movie of this book, but as it is now, there's so much dead weight it took some real effort to make it to the end.

I made it, though, and found the ending ultimately disappointing. I mean, was that why I went through the 900 pages? The book was interesting enough to keep me reading, but in the end, felt like a disappointment. If you can read Finnish, Risto Isomäki's Sarasvatin hiekkaa has a similar theme, but is much superior (at least three times better, with just one third of the pages!). (Review based on the Finnish translation.) [ The Swarm: A Novel of the Deep at Amazon.co.uk ] [&nsbp;Der Schwarm at LibraryThing ]