Well, this novel slowly snuck up on me, slowly but unstoppably. The first 70 pages or so seem fairly straight-forward future dystopia - not with all questions answered, but still. And then we get into the meat of the plot and it becomes something else entirely. Sure, you can (and possibly should) find all sorts of common vibrations here; of how we don't all live in the same (perceived) world, of how the constant hunt for the future ravages the present, of how we're always prepared to do horrible things rather than reshape our reality. But honestly, the one thing that kind of bugs me about the book is that we get it spelled out in the end. (If you believe it. It's all relative.) It's in the sheer panicked movement forward that the novel lives. Like a shark. On land. Without fins. It's in the impossibility of knowing what someone else sees. In the vertigo of passing through.

Train kept a-rolling all night long
Train kept a-rolling all night long
With a heave, and a ho
But I just couldn't let her go