Books I Didn't Finish: Wool

Apple TV Plus+ Extra Unlimited Turbo has debuted an adaptation of Hugh Howey’s Silo trilogy. Coincidentally (or maybe not), Amazon had the first book on sale around the same time. I tried reading it. I couldn’t get through it. Here’s why.

The premise is one that will be instantly familiar to you even if you’ve never specifically read or watched anything that uses it: in the future the world has been rendered inhospitable, so the remnants of humanity live in a gigantic underground structure (or “Silo”, if you will). Generations have passed and the inhabitants of the silo no longer remember anything about the nature of the disaster that drove their ancestors underground, or even how long ago it happened.

At the beginning of the story the silo’s Sheriff deliberately breaks his culture’s greatest law by expressing a desire to go outside; his wish is granted, necessitating the hiring of a new replacement. Our protagonist Juliette, a reclusive mechanic from the deepest levels of the silo, is chosen for the role. Before she can even start the job, the silo’s long-serving and popular mayor is poisoned, plunging Jules straight into a high-stakes murder investigation involving the political tensions between the silo’s various factions.

Wool started out by impressing me. Chances are that upon reading that premise, a plot twist immediately occurred to you: the powers that be in the silo are lying and the world outside isn’t actually deadly. What if I told you that the silo doesn’t actually have any windows, just exterior cameras? (People sent out to die for breaking the rules are made to clean them during their remaining minutes of life). It couldn’t be more obvious. You’re a smart reader, you’ve got this.

Surprisingly, Wool seems to deploy this twist right at the beginning of the book–only for this twist to be revealed as a cruel illusion, engineered by the silo technologists in order to help preserve the cleaning ritual and uphold the social order. This, I think, shows a canny insight into the tropes of sci-fi and the abilities of the average reader to figure them out.

Unfortunately, this was the last time the book impressed me.

After this point the story slows to an absolute fucking crawl. The assassination of the mayor that serves as the story’s real inciting incident doesn’t happen until nearly a quarter of the way through the book. Before that there’s a loooong section detailing Mayor Jahns’ journey into the lower levels to recruit Juliette, and by the end of it you’ll feel like you’ve trudged up and down every step with her.

I think this was meant to provide an overview of the silo and its culture, but that runs headlong into another problem, which is that the silo just isn’t a very compelling setting. Its physical features are only vaguely sketched out and don’t seem like they’d be any more interesting if more attention was paid to them, and what we’re shown of its culture is mostly functional plot elements rather than worldbuilding or flavour. If a story is going to be contained entirely within a single location then that location needs to be the main character, but the silo just doesn’t have enough going on to justify this level of focus.

Once this finally ends and the POV switches to our ostensible protagonist, we get chapter upon chapter of Jules navel-gazing and repetitively thinking through things that the book has already very firmly established. I assume at some point the book gets around to the murder mystery and political tensions that it’s supposed to be about, but I didn’t make it that far.

(The book actually seems to be aware that it’s going to bore readers: there’s a cheap flash-forward inserted in order to assure us that something interesting is going to happen again, eventually, if only we keep reading).

The characterisation of Juliette is also very shallow. It’s one of those cases where a character’s personality basically stops at their profession, so she’s constantly thinking about things in terms of gears, loose nuts and electrical equipment. Like, she plugs a USB stick into a computer and we’re told that she doesn’t know a lot about computers because she doesn’t use them much while she’s fixing pumping hoses or whatever, but she isn’t entirely ignorant of them because sometimes she needs to use automated valves and I don’t care. I don’t care how proficient she is with computers to begin with (she’s not even doing anything complicated with it), but if that becomes important later then we don’t need an explanation that ties into her day job. Just tell us she’s not great with computers. It’s fine.

Maybe I’m wrong here, but this feels exactly like the kind of character you get from those terrible writing exercises where you write a little bio for each of your characters and list their traits and Flaws™. I can see the list for Jules now:

Traits–Is an engineer

Flaws–Doesn’t use computers much

I’m probably going to give the TV series a whirl since I feel like there is an interesting mystery plot buried somewhere under here. Reactions to the first few episodes have been very positive from what I’ve seen, and on film it’s really not possible to sink into the kind of repetitive interiority that drags down this book even if you want to, so hopefully I can at some point come back and comment on the actual plot of Wool. For now, I won’t be finishing this book and I certainly won’t be delving into the two sequels.