Newton's Wake A Space Opera

This was a novel I wanted to like much more than I ultimately did. I like Ken MacLeod's other novels very much. The Fall Revolution series was excellent; I taught one of the books at the end of my British novels seminar. These are richly imagined tales with intricate plots and challenging world-building, combining deep knowledge of left politics with science. I didn't appreciate some of his later titles as much, but liked that way they handled blogging (Learning The World, The Execution Channel). I also picked Newton's Wake because I was looking for space opera. Well. There is some good stuff in here. The basic plot is fun. Four centuries from now humanity has spread across the stars, picking over remnants of a massive singularity which raptured away a chunk of civilization and wrecked a lot more. The protagonist is a Carlyle, a Scots crime family that now controls a wormhole network. They are opposed by several other post-singularity entities, each with a distinct ideology, aesthetic, and set of goals. They tangle on Eurydice, a planet with an unusual colony and stranger artifact. One faction is religiously minded because they claim to have proven the cyclical universe theory (109). So: good world-building and stage-setting. Newton's Wake is also very playful. Faster than light traveling (FTL) becomes "fittling". A future copyright enforcement agency is "popularly known as the Mouse" (50) (a Disney joke). One character creates showy operas often based on fantastic misreadings of 20th-century history, most notably an epic tragedy about Leonid Brezhnev, Prince of Muscovy (122ff), and "The gunfight between the Bushes and the Bn-Ladens in West Side Story" (55). There are also cute references to other sf, including writers like Moorcock and Wells. The novel begins strong with a burst of action, our protagonist screwing up, and a spate of decent exposition. Mid-way through, though, things weaken. Two new characters appear, resurrected Scots folksingers, and they don't add much to the story (even the author seems uninterested, overusing the same words to describe them, as Caulder repeatedly leers). Our heroine does stuff, but remains the same person. The plot returns to life in some spectacular battles, but flares out without resolution. And the finale, well, does very little and doesn't much much sense. I kept losing focus during the book's second half, a reaction I haven't had with Macleod's earlier works. I finished, but wasn't happy to do so. Now I'm going to reread some of his blog posts to feel better.