Originally Posted by
Socha:
“Hehe... very subtle.... 
But yeah... I guess there's only so much you can say about sadistic sex and capitalist conspiracies.... he surely didn't waste the other 600 pages on character development....
”
No, no, he kept that to the bare minimum

, although he did introduce a vast number of peripheral characters for reasons that escaped me at first, until it dawned on me that as each new character was brought up to speed with the developments of the story (well known to the reader by then), the page count was also increasing nicely. The cherry on the cake was the deus ex machina-ish ending. It's like he forgot there was one more character that had to be killed off and wrote the final chapter on the bus, on the way to the publishers. Probably on the back of an envelope.
But I did finish reading it!