What an odd duck of a doorstopper! So ingenious in its creativity, so playful, so confident in its narrative voice, so self-assuredly sprawling, and yet so skillful in how it rewove and returned all the various threads together in an elaborate fractal dance. Sam and Bryony were quite passive in the various events, leaving it to the huge cast of entertaining secondary characters to make events happen, but there were so many characters, and so many events, that it seems churlish to criticize.