The Coast of Everything Author: Guillermo StitchISBN-13: 978-1963846423Publisher: Sagging Meniscus PressGuideline Price: £27.99Guillermo Stitch’s new novel is a strange beast, elephantine in its dimensions yet more akin to a duck-billed platypus in its bewildering eccentricity. The Coast of Everything is a sci-fi fantasia set in a dystopian future, but in literary terms it’s a throwback: the pacing is wilfully languid, with swathes of the tale told through dialogue; there are stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories. Characters have the sorts of names – Arenaceous, Fafl, Wigbert – we might expect to encounter in a book about wizards and hobbits. The 19th-century novel meets digital-era angst by way of genre fiction in an eclectic, meandering mash-up. The novel comprises several obscurely interlinked narratives, the heftiest of which involves an Irish private investigator hired by a mega-wealthy American tech heiress to find her estranged twin sister. They traverse the North African desert in an SUV, accompanied by a surly bodyguard. The detective is forever passing out – drugged, drunk or beaten up – and waking up confused; he encounters a pair of self-immolating incestuous siblings, and is seduced by some sadistic courtesans. Meanwhile, his employer offloads at length about her family psychodrama, recounting, among other things, her immigrant mother’s wistful reminiscences of settling in California: it represented “the boundary between an old set of possibilities and the set that dwindles around me now ... The coast of everything.”While the dialogue in this segment is redolent of an airport thriller, the register is altogether different in another story, set on a remote island where a young heroine, Lil, is among a small group assigned to study a vast literary archive at the behest of a nefarious entity known only as “the Magistracy”, which has deemed novels to be “powerful toxins”. They toil under the supervision of a creepy stationmaster who has implanted them with nanochips. The language here is almost parodically mannered, featuring archaic phrasings like “depends from” and “seven of the clock”; a hurried action is carried out “with considerable celerity.” Conversely, when none other than Charles Dickens himself pops up in another story, in the form of a hard-drinking ghost who cohabits with a hapless wannabe writer, he speaks like a modern surfer dude. (“Man, we gotta get you a life, bro.”) Amusingly, he is referred to by his full name throughout, even in dialogue. This riff is charmingly whimsical, but elsewhere the novel’s comic sensibility feels strained. Stitch’s mock-florid descriptions of luscious Arab beauties are a case in point: “Each cheek was a garden of countless delights ... Her thick black eyebrows were two strong bows. One shot at heaven and one at his heart ...” There’s no satirical bite here, just purposeless pastiche – the literary equivalent of putting on a silly voice. What connects these various narratives is the theme of storytelling. The authoritarian proscription of literature is a premise borrowed from Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, and pointedly repurposed for our times. In an exchange loaded with topical resonance, the tech heiress explains that her corporation is concerned with “Nothing as facile as ideology” – its only goal is to perpetuate itself. Can the power of the written word save us from soulless digital technocracy? When a character’s high-flown diction is attributed to excessive exposure to canonical fiction (“He’s lit. Too much Dickens and Dostoevsky and all that other trash”), we sense the author is winking at us.Stitch is to be commended for his bravery – it takes a certain chutzpah to publish a glacially-paced 750-page saga in the year 2026 – but he doesn’t do enough to earn his reader’s sustained attention; on the contrary, he appears to take it for granted. The prose is terribly ponderous at times, and the integration of disparate narratives and registers is far from seamless. That the novel’s anachronisms are proffered in a spirit of knowing homage – like some sprawling love-letter to analogue literary culture – doesn’t entirely let him off the hook.It’s hard to buy into a world on such terms. Rather than being transported, one has the sense of being trapped within an elaborate in-joke. At one point, Lil complains that she can’t make sense of the literature she is surveying because, ensconced as she is on a remote island, she struggles to connect it to her own experience. Her lament mirrors the reader’s predicament with uncanny precision: “What are these events ... Where are these places? If it is all a fiction, who is the fiction for? What is the impulse?” Houman Barekat is a London-based critic