darlingdearestdead's Book Journey

It’s hard to find a way to describe this book. Fundamentally, I think it’s more a vibes read because the plot itself is a little lackluster and doesn’t quite tie up in a satisfying bow, especially for being framed around a locked room mystery.

I love Arkady Martine’s prose—it’s lush and sometimes lyrical; for someone with aphantasia, I love how much weight sound gets in the description of this book especially when it comes to Rose House’s speaking (the vocal tags surrounding its dialogue were always of interest, the way its laughter is described was fascinating)—but it doesn’t entirely lend itself to simple and straight details, to a mystery being solved in an uncomplicated way.

Only, I don’t think that’s really what the book’s about, nor do I think it’s what makes this book compelling. Instead, what makes Rose/House is, well, Rose House. There’s a distinct eeriness that colors its interactions with our human cast from the start.

It begins in just vocals, in the way it thinks at computer speeds, but talks with human cadence, in the way it pauses to mask its inhumanity, but betrays itself by way of content.

(“I’m a piece of architecture, Detective. How should I know how humans are like to die?”)

And it only gets more strange as the story progresses.

As the characters enter Rose House we learn more about the mystery, but really, this becomes an unravelling of architecture and AI, of revealing Rose House for what it is.

And what it isn’t.

(“It was playing with her. […] It knew, and it was deliberately pretending it didn’t. There was nothing in the nature of an artificial intelligence that forbade it to lie. Nothing at all, save the few failsafes that produced duty-of-care calls. It would have to recognize lying, though, internalize the concept and the methodology of falsehoods, and then choose to engage in it as an—aesthetic practice. No wonder Rose House had figured out how.”)

In the end, again, this is a vibes read, one that hit at the right time, place and mood for me. I can easily see why people dislike or are disappointed by this, it’s not a very grounded book nor is it a satisfying locked room mystery, but I found myself gravitating to the character work rather than the plot. The thought of Rose House—the AI, not the architecture—is going to linger, and that, I think is as intended, which makes this successful to me.

After all, do we not live in a world where we must think about AI more and more? About what it is? About what it isn’t?