I’m enjoying Unsong quite a bit, but I have to say its quality of, for lack of a better term, deliberate nerdsnipery turns me off some. I’m fine when catching some subtle reference or figuring out a narratively significant fact from little clues acts as a little extra whipped cream on an otherwise delicious literary sundae, but Unsong feels set up to make trying to solve all the mysteries, catch all the hints, and disambiguate all the references a central component of the reading experience (a feeling confirmed by the fandom I’ve seen in the comments and tumblr posts here and there).
I’ve never really liked riddles. They’re artificial in ways that make them significantly different both from intellectual problem solving when no other agents are involved and from genuine interactions with a possibly untrustworthy agent. The trickery with words, phrasing that would absolutely be considered lying in normal contexts and is obviously intended to give the wrong impression while remaining technically true, the deliberate obfuscation of certain relevant facts to make the task hard enough combined with the deliberate revelation to make the task possible, and the general sense that a good riddle is one that makes both the riddler and the successful riddled feel particularly clever (and possibly a little subversive/smart-assed?) combine to make a game I just don’t want to play. It feels like an archetypal arms race: riddlers and riddled develop more and more sophisticated tricks, frameworks, etc. that don’t help with anything but winning the game. And there’s something off-putting to me personally about temporarily treating friends and loved ones as untrustworthy/to be outsmarted (I similarly don’t like games with bluffing).
This is a hugely personal preference, of course. There’s not anything wrong with liking riddles. It just means certain things are not for me. And there’s enough of a story enjoyable on other terms in Unsong for me. But I wish this aspect were toned down some.
Part of this is just that I have trouble resisting a stupid joke, even when it’s in a dead language and requires five layers of background knowledge to make sense. Then people who don’t have the five layers of background knowledge think it’s a Deep Mystery and spend a lot of time unraveling it, only to be rewarded with a stupid joke at the end. I admit that my love of in-jokes is annoying and I apologize.
But part of it is also supposed to be something deeper (warning: this next part will be hopelessly pretentious). In the same way that Northern Caves had a theme of texts that are difficult to understand, I want Unsong to have a theme of texts that are way too easy to understand - in other words, pattern-matching, pareidolia, seeing a million connections but not being sure any of them are really there. The book’s central metaphor for this is kabbalists studying the Bible, but I want the book itself to channel that same feeling in a non-metaphorical way.
So for example, in Chapter 5 Ana uses this metaphor of goodness as music and evil as a discordant opposite of music. It’s easy enough to tie this into the book’s use of “singers” who sing the Names of God vs. UNSONG the United Nations Subcommittee On Names of God who try to stop them. But then the connections multiply. The title page quotes Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which does have a verse on Names of God - but which also refers to God as “Lord of Song”. The interlude references Peter Singer as the in-world archetype of good. Its morally ambiguous main character has the last name “Teller”, which seems clearly juxtaposed to Singer as if it’s someone who is working at something similar but missing the beauty and finesse - but then the book says that it derives from Edward Teller, who invented the H-bomb and almost caused the apocalypse. But then maybe that’s also a smokescreen and he’s just called “Teller” because he’s the narrator of the story. But then the book also talks about how he works as a literal (bank) teller at Cash For Gold and how this is a metaphor for kabbalah because he’s “freely interchanging symbols with material reality”. And also, a smith is someone who forges things and “tellus” as in “tellurium” is Latin for “Earth”, so Smith-Teller is someone who remakes the world. (There are other things in this space too, but I won’t spoil them.)
And at some point you realize I can’t possibly have intended all of these meanings, because most of this stuff is in reality and not in the book at all and I don’t have enough degrees of freedom to make it work. I can control the name of the in-book organization UNSONG (although even there, “United Nations Subcommittee On Names of God” is by far the most logical thing to call the thing that it is, so can that really be counted as authorial meddling?), but I can’t control Peter Singer’s name, or Edward Teller’s name, or what a bank teller is, and some of these things *have to* be coincidences, and then you either go full skeptic and start questioning whether your pattern-matching ability even works at all, or full kabbalist and assume all patterns are significant, even the ones in the real world which don’t make sense in a rational framework.
When there are little hints of solveable mysteries in the text, I don’t intend it to be some sort of stupid battle of wits in which I try to misdirect my readers - in fact, I’m curious what exactly you see that seems like that, since I’ve tried specifically to avoid that kind of thing. I intend it to be the beginning of a rabbit hole that can be followed arbitrarily far without a predetermined end, until eventually it even goes out of the text itself.