The Silent Invasion by James  Bradley

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The premise for this book is intriguing - the notion of an infection which alters human personality and behaviour is a fascinating one. The prospect of the Earth's ecosystem being altered by the introduction of alien bioluminescent organisms seemed like a promising scenario for a dystopian novel.

Unfortunately, the first novel in the trilogy was disappointing. There are a few interesting ideas buried in this story, but in order to find them you have to wade through a couple of hundred pages of tedious and somewhat cliched narrative of a young girl running away and making a perilous journey in order to save her younger sister from being detained by the authorities tasked with preventing the spread of the infection.

This novel is really a road story, a tale of a teenager leaving her home and traveling through unfamiliar territory towards an unknown future. For the adolescent reader (the target audience being "young adult") this theme is probably an appealing one. But for older readers, its all too familiar and predictable.

There is very little in this book about the alien life forms or their influence on the people infected by them. I'm sure they will be explored in the second and third volumes in the trilogy, and I would hope that the later installments in the story demonstrate the intrigue and imagination that I was anticipating when I picked up the first volume.

The sad thing about this book is that it is so boring, that many readers will not bother to read the second book in the series, yet that is where I would expect the story to get interesting, since it takes place after the protagonist has reached "the Zone", where the infected people are held in isolation from the rest of the population.

I think it would have been preferable if the three parts of this novel were published in a single volume, and the editors had cut the length of the chapters relating the story of the heroine's escape with her sister. This first volume merely hints at the story that might emerge from the later chapters.

Publishing novels aimed at the Young Adult market in multi-volume format has become standard practice in recent years. But for this particular story, the introductory chapters just do not work as a stand alone novella.



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