Judging by the other reviews here I'm clearly missing something.

I came to this book expecting an easy to read Sci-Fi pulp story, hopefully entertaining, at best uplifting. I almost got what I was expecting, but not quite.

To it's credit, it held my interest enough to actually finish it, and the internal logic and scientific concept was consistant and well-thought out enough to be believable. That's about the most positive thing I can find to say about it.

As I began to read I was so stricken with the clumsiness of the dialogue and the two dimensional gimmickry of the characterisation that I assumed this must be a very brave (and lucky to be published) first novel. Not sure if that's the case, but my hopes that there might be a powerful or clever twist that had contributed to it's acceptance by the Publishing House were sadly not to be realised.

There is a sense throughout that it might all be worth it, but the ending is so weak as to leave me resenting the time spent ploughing through the final chapters, misprints and all. I was amazed to find on completion that the author has gone on to pen a whole series based on the characters found in this book, each of which can be reduced to one 'interesting' personality trait.

It is littered with the sort of literary rule-breaking that requires an artist of much greater stature than this for justification. For instance, I accept that his use of dialogue so clumsy as to be (literally) sometimes in fictional alien tongues was an attempt to give his conceptual hybrid human/alien language an exotic feel... unfortunately it succeeded, in my case, only to irritate.

Probably the most interesting character is introduced in detail early in the story, only to play no further role. The Sci-Fi cliches come thick and fast.

A strong ending could, perhaps, have excused the weakness of the prose, but this, unfortunately, was simply not forthcoming.

I don't normally find it useful to contribute such negative reviews, but amidst the shining praise found here, I really felt there needed to be at least one dissenting voice to warn to potential first time reader.

Well, this is certainly not as easy a read as Zen. While the first book cleverly drew the reader into philosophical debate, gently revealing the background and views of the author almost stealthily, in this new volume Pirsig clearly expects the reader to have already cleared any psycholoigical block that might require such intellectual massage.

Twenty years on Pirsig is far more forthright in his attempts to explain his highly original and complex world view, to the extent that the 'story' becomes something of an irritating interuption. What plot there is (a couple of days on a boat), is so clearly autobiographical, that the use of the 'character' name Phaedrus would be highy pretentious were it not for a need for continuity from the previous book.

Even more that Zen, this is little more than an attempt by the author to convince the audience of his very personal philoshophical standpoint, and in this he is evangelical to the point of arrogance. But this detracts only a little from the undeniable fact that his socio-metaphysical standpoint is indeed highly self-consistant and quite staggeringly original. That he falls into the trap of proving his points using an internal logic that pre-assumes the veracity of his system is no more or less a problem here than in conventional philosophy.

All in all, the writer is more mature and cynical after the intervening years, and this book lacks the sense of revelation to be found in Zen, but it has to be recognised that this follow up is refining a concept first espoused in the earlier book, and it's hard to imagine how it could have been presented differently.

What Pirsig has to say definitely deserves to be heard, and it is to his credit that he delayed following up a previous smash hit until he had something concrete to add.