The novel follows a familiar template: someone dies and everyone manages to figure out why it happened. In novels, people often figure out why things happened. Talent has something happen and then later, a character has a line like, “Oh that must have been why you gave the gun to Susan.” Or “Those must have been the bloody footprints of Vadim Batchelet that I saw yesterday.”
So Talent really is bending over backwards to deliver “a novel” that is filled with many hectic events. But you don’t really have to follow all of them. There are so many of them that they blend together into a sturdy matrix that will surely fill in page after page. As is often the case, while the antics of Wilder Penrose or Simon Delage are difficult to remember from one page to the next, it’s the matrix itself that is more prominent—the batter or medium of the story.