Book Review--Numbers 2: The Chaos

     What can I say? After the brilliance of Rachel Ward's Numbers, I was thoroughly disappointed by its successor, The Chaos. It's a typical sequel of the Iron Man 2 sort--at best, a snooze, and and it's worst, a complete let-down. I was apprehensive when I heard a Numbers 2 was in the works, and unfortunately my suspicions have been confirmed.
     In The Chaos, Ward decides to stray from its predescessor and use dual-first-person in which the narrative is split between the two protagonists. Not only is this inconsistent with the first Numbers, but it creates a host of other problems throughout the novel. The character's voices are hardly distinguishable from each other, a detriment to their personalities as a whole. The dual narrative also creates a rut in the plot in which the characters are continually meeting up, sharing an experience from their own perspectives, splitting of to recount their own tale, then rejoining again to share another experience. She is still a good writer, but had Ward decide to stick to one vantage point, many of these problems could have been avoided.
     It would have been better for Ward to have stuck to the characters from the first installment rather than draw new blood. The protagonists Adam and Sarah aren't much more than black-and-white photocopies of the original characters in Numbers. They are stilted and mechanical--their responses to the conflicts around them don't feel human. The relationship between the two is prescribed rather than developed throughout the book. There is no chemistry between them, for they are in love simply because they are destined to fall in love, a fate they share with characters myriads of mediocre literature throughout the ages.
     The plot of The Chaos is truly chaotic, I might even say shizophrenic. Ward skips the plot across a lake of conflicts, touching on an overwhelming number of issues without ever breaking the surface tension on any one of them. Topics such as incest, teen pregnancy, and deformity--all subjects meritting volumes of books on their own--become hat tricks in a desperate attempt to dramatize the story. In the end, a series of plot devices were all that held the book together. Even with another sequel promised to come, there were so many unresolved conflicts and unexplicable events that I can't even begin to settle the story in my mind.
     Maybe I'm being particularly harsh because I expected more out of a book with such a great first installment. Numbers was raw and real. The problem with The Chaos is that it is so shallow, so sensationalized, and so scatter-brained, that it is simply not believable. It disintegrates into science fiction of the blandest sort, and gives us little to hope for in the final book of the series, Infinity.