What a horrific shame. This book should be everything I wanted and more. As a philosophy fanatic, a novel which is literally constructed out of philosophy to formulate a political allegory is my idea of heaven. But after 100 pages in, I surrendered. What a shame. Why? I’m afraid it as far too on the nose for my liking: the story was painfully shoehorned into philosophical concepts to a point it felt so laboured my head started to throb with boredom.

I prefer novels that show don’t tell. I was open to the blatant use of overt philosophical concepts as a humorous gag, such as the names of the cities, countries and gangs. It had the potential to be a Terry Pratchett-esque tongue in cheek play on familiar principles (which are, in turn, manipulated and toyed with for entertainment).

But as the novel progressed, my hopes were dashed. It felt as though these obvious names were not used as a playful wit, but more to hammer home and spoon feed the reader to digest the principles. It resulted in the over stressing and emphasising of points which killed any sense of logical and imaginative freedom for the reader. There was no room for interpretation, there was no room for the reader to work it out for them self - the challenge of unpicking imagery and allegory was stripped away from me because I was told absolutely everything to the point of boredom and exhaustion. I have no time for over laboured narrative, so I passed the book over in favour of literature more cleverly and literally written. It’s a shame, because the concept was wonderful, but there’s no pleasure in being told a story as if the narrator is holding your hand and doesn’t trust you to not pick up on every single clever detail they’re shoe horning in, because heaven forbid we overlook any spec of knowledge. I’ll stick to the philosophical literature of Italo Calvino and Herman Broch in future.