Grailer is a child prodigy, able to reach the forbidden Fourth Literacy with his computer access. At the age of nine he is rescued and trained by a variety of strange characters before the dreaded CIRCE agents can kill him. But once grown, he must eventually face his fate.
I really expected to like this book, given the other John Ford novels I've read and enjoyed. But I just couldn't get into it. Set in an unpleasant high-tech interstellar civilisation, where decadent long-lived humans seem to have nothing better to do than dress up, play games, and kill each other, it is told in a particular flowery elliptical fractured style that I find unrewarding to read. So I gave up at the end of chapter 6. (However, I did appreciate the fact that a plausible mechanism was put in place to allow the VR Hounds to kill a hacker through a computer terminal.)
