The book's longest, best and most rewarding segment is a first-rate run of British suspense writing. Burgess ladles on rich characterization and the best kind of paranoia in this series of chapters aboard a cruise ship with only a handful of passengers and staff, a claustrophobic Agatha Christie environment where everyone is up to something and proper manners mask nefarious intent. Especially worthy of mention is a gruesome eating contest Hillier engages in with a fellow glutton. When Burgess sets himself a mark, he hits it, hard enough for the reader to feel and remember. Tremor's failure is in its larger effect, or lack of effect. Late in the book, Burgess the Joyce scholar finds diagetic excuses -- delirium, drug use -- to churn the text into passable but recognizably mid-Ulysses stylee cacophony, fragmenting phrases and words with punctuation, building elaborate homophonic pun games that are respectable accomplishments on their own terms but do the novel that contains them a distracting disservice.