It took me about six weeks to get through this novel, even though it’s a novel I’ve been anticipating for quite a while. At the end of the day, I have to give this a low grade. But at the same time I’m not going to organize a picket line against it, you know? Shift and I have a complicated relationship. Fair note: This is going to be a bit of a long review. That can happen when you’re with a book for a very long time.
Shift is the second book in the Silo series, preceded by Wool. This book trilogy inspired the mega-smash Apple TV series, which is my favourite show on the platform. We spend all of the first book (and all of Seasons 1 and 2 of the show) from the point of view of Silo 18, and then Silo 17 when Juliette Nichols is banished and she finds herself there. We at first don’t know the residents of Silo 18 are in the eighteenth silo. They assume they’re the only silo in the world, and so do we.
The year is 2345, and no one is alive from when people used to live above the ground. The air is poisoned, and the silos are all that are left of humanity, who don’t remember anymore what life used to be like when they lived around forests and beaches and mountains. Anyone who wants to go out is given a hazmat suit, watched by feed that is displayed in the main silo cafeteria…and they never manage to walk past the hill before collapsing and dying. That is until Juliette Nichols was able to, thanks to her friends in Mechanical using suit tape that was not deliberately flawed like all the others. She is able to survive in Silo 17, and get back home days later, alive.
That was all in Wool, and now we have Shift, which is a fair title, because it shifts the points of view to a new cast; a politician named Donald who is serving a term in Congress in the 2040s. He is given an assignment by the current president Thurman to design a top secret special bunker. And as this project goes through, being away from his wife Helen and sister Charlotte, nuclear war with Iran is right around the corner. We also hear from someone named Troy years later, who is unfrozen from a cryogenic coffin; in ice for so many years. Who now lives in one of these silos. With that we have a 570-paged sort-of follow-up to Wool.
The main reason I was excited to read Shift was my desperation to learn what happens next in the Silo series without having to wait 18 months for the next season. And I read Wool even though I knew what was supposed to happen because I wanted to be familiar with Hugh Howey’s writing style before going into Shift. I gave Wool a decent grade. But even though for this book I was going in fresh and blissfully clueless, I just couldn’t share my enthusiasm with Shift, for three main reasons.
One: Acting more as a prequel or telling a story that happened alongside Book 1, kind of like the storytelling style of Rashomon, this book takes away all of the characters from before, and while I appreciated Howey’s willingness to take that storytelling risk, none of these new characters are as memorable or interesting as the others. The only point of view that is as interesting as Juliette is Jimmy, who we don’t meet up with until way late in the story, and is a character we’re familiar with already anyway.
Two: The book jumps between points of view and points in time a little too often, and it can be dizzying trying to keep up with everything going on as a result.
Three, and this is the big one: The book doesn’t really have a climax or main focus. Because of those things, I felt like I was reading a short story collection instead of anything that had a particular path to follow. Some people like novels made up of short stories, but I’m not one of them. Most books by the three-quarter point pick up with some kind of suspenseful conflict, and that’s usually what keeps me invested. But at that point during Shift, there was nothing of the sort, and I was just ready to be done with it.
Yet after all that, there’s a part of me that respects the book. It certainly excels at giving you the feeling these people have gone through the wringer from the claustrophobia and hopelessness of the world. A lot of the book has a hint of earned sadness. The cryogenic chambers were a fascinating new touch, and by the end, I really cared about what would happen to some of these characters in the next book. The best part of the book is, as I said, when we hear from Jimmy, aka Solo, but that doesn’t happen for a while. I also really felt Donald’s regret by the end at what became of the world and his role in it. There’s a lot to think about. The very end left me excited for Dust. I just hope that it’s a lot more focused on some main ideas than this one.
Shift is an origin story, the book in the trilogy that kind of scapegoats itself so you know as much as you can about the world before it wraps up in Dust. And some parts of it are good. But I’d only recommend it for those who don’t mind atmosphere over action, who don’t mind giving developed characters backseats, who don’t mind slow paces, and who wouldn’t prefer just getting the synopsis through Sparknotes if any of those things sound like too much trouble.
My grade: 1 and a half stars out of 5
William J. McGinn 
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