Book Review: Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Dervish House was the first of the Hugo books I read, but its taken me a bit to compose my thoughts about it. If that's a good thing or not, you'll just have to read the full review to find out!

Novel: Dervish House
Author: Ian McDonald

Set in the background of Istanbul in 2027, Dervish House is a novel that is steeped in both mysticism and nanotechnology. Following the fortunes of six characters across 7 days, the book weaves together the threads of the story to create a riveting story full of drama, conflict and intrigue.


The titular Dervish House is the tie that binds the characters together, all of them living or working in the house or area around it. The characters range from a child who suffers from Long QT syndrome and explores his surroundings using a high tech nano-robot to a retired economics professor who has ties to radical political movements.

While I enjoyed Dervish House, I found it difficult to get into, and feel I have missed out on quite a bit of the intricacies of the book. The novel excellently sets the scene of an Istanbul steeped in history but trying to carve its own place in the modern world. To do this, the book is full of Turkish and Arabic words, which I took a while to fully process. I also think that some of the ideas and background to the world I missed, but I'm not sure if that was my reading of it, or poor communication by the author. Certainly I think its a book that you can get more from with successive readings.

When it came to the SF aspects of the novel, I was on much firmer ground. I would love a BitBot robot that Can, the young boy in the book, uses to explore his surroundings; and the ideas of a machine using your junk DNA to store information is interesting, and well thought through. If nothing else, its obvious that Ian McDonald has done a lot of research before writing the book.

I did find the way he handled transitions into flashbacks a little disorientating to start with. He does it in a very flowing style, very much like how you'd slip into reminiscing in reality. However, it does mean that if you aren't reading carefully, you miss the transition and end up being confused for a bit. Each character ends up with a couple of flashbacks during the novel, so you do get used to it, and in each case the information provided goes to further either the plot or character background.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, but I didn't devour it quite like I did with Feed. The story itself is interesting, and the setting is well described, but I always felt I was missing something, either in the background or the cultural aspects of the setting.