Backup is a sciece fiction/action story about a cop who is brought back into the wrong body. He needs to figure out what happened and why while people from the responsible company are trying to clean up.
The story addresses a couple of philosophical issues such as identity and the role of AI in society, I can’t say more without spoilers
The author is a French filmmaker, this is his first book in English.
Although the story is interesting and sometimes compelling, the book and the writing has a number of shortcomings.
I felt the writing was uninspired and sometimes redundant. I believe some of this would clean itself up if there were actors portraying the parts. Even the kearning was bad and distracting at times.
The protagonist and his wife are introduced as perfect people in a perfect relationship, this was overdone but I see it’s value in contrasting with later events. It was too much.
The author often uses impersonal nouns instead of pronouns, such as the cop, the assassin, the adult, when a pronoun would be more appropriate. It felt like he was introducing a new character at first, it read awkwardly. He also uses long and uninteresting descriptions that I wanted to skip over.
Character behavior is often unconvincing and characters seem convinced to change their minds too easily. The text tends to tell rather than show and some chapter-ending harbingers just felt bad.
There are setup problems, buildings that are supposed to be super secure allow people to enter with briefcases that can’t be scanned and aren’t inspected, those same buildings have other access points without security later in the book.
The professional assassins spent time mourning the loss of one of their own during a fight.
Despite these issues, I still feel the book was good. It is a good story with a good ending.
