The Technologists by Matthew Pearl is one of those books that I kept thinking, I’m getting bored here, and then suddenly, the novel would open up to something interesting and I would be hooked all over again. This cycle happened two or three times. So, I stayed with the story until the end, particularly because I loved how Pearl used the city of Boston in the late 1800s as his setting and how he used the creation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and its political battles against Harvard) as the backdrop for a mystery story just as technology and science were taking hold in culture.
I’m not sure what kept putting me off. I think it may have been Pearl’s writing style, which intentionally sought to bring the reader into the diction and pace of Beantown in the years after the Civil War as society began to move into the Industrial Age. Science and technology were viewed with suspicion, even as electricity and other inventions were completely changing the world around people. So, maybe it is not Pearl’s fault that I kept wanting to push the plot along. The plot was interesting: a rogue scientist bent on destroying Boston by using their scientific and technological skills to create havoc and mayhem.
The Technologists are a secret group of brainy, geeky college student at the new MIT who are bent on finding and stopping this madman, even as they themselves as the target of suspicion because of their very technological prowess. The last section of the book comes alive with a number of twists and action events that had me racing to get to the end, just to find out how it all ends. I’m happy that I stayed with it. And I may never look at the Back Bay of Boston again without thinking of Pearl’s book, and the way that MIT slowly and controversially came into existence (a helpful note by Pearl at the end of the novel explains his research and origins of the story, which I appreciated).
Peace (in the tech),
Kevin