Assuming we post this, and don't just sit there feeling upset with ourselves?
The Green Planet, by T. W. Meade
The story is interesting, but the major framework of the plot is padded-out with pointless pulp adventures that, dense and clipped, never extend for the length that they might, and endless descriptive passages which, serving the story though they do, distance the reader and create a sense of mild-interested ennui, rather than rapt fascination as he so clearly wishes.
Mr Meade has the problem of, rather than not being able to tell a story, being able to tell a story far too swiftly. There are countless events scattered across only a few pages that another novelist might have dedicated a chapter to.
His prose is fluent, and his descriptions evocative, yet he is so obsessed with clever little word games and amateur-poetics that what is at first charming becomes quite tiresome after a time. We suggest that Mr Meade decide whether he is a novelist or a speech-writer.
Characterisation is vague, opting for the less-is-more approach so effective in films such as A Fistful of Dollars. However, unlike this wonderful film, the characters become hazy and insubstantial, and there interaction with incidental figures becomes hazy and awkward, as though we have been given the start of a scene and then jumped five paragraphs forward.
All in all, the feeling given by The Green Planet is of reading a lengthy epic, attacked at random points by a Readers Digest condenser, and at others by a rambling National Geographic content writer.
