So many recommendations and good reviews so I thought I would give this one a spin, and it probably falls under the heading of "biggest disappointment of the year". Michelle Paver is a children's writer, and I'm sorry to say that it really shows. It is as if she has set out with a warning from her publishers not to frighten anybody too badly, and there's no chance of any bad dreams being initiated by this novel.
An amateur research team set out for the Arctic wilderness, and a string of misadventures reduces their number to one who carries on the project while waiting for the others to join back up with him. He feels lonely. He thinks he sees a ghost. Someone tells him the place is haunted. He does see a ghost. He runs away from the ghost.
The research is thorough and unfortunately, it tends to show - Paver doesn't miss many opportunities to shoehorn in a brand name, or a contemporary reference. But good research doen't necessarily make for good storytelling, and not for good adult storytelling. There is insufficient tension, the pace is frightfully slow, there is little real sense of menace, the "reveal" is in a dream, and even then only fitfully related so that the true horror is
so concealed as to be almost Lovecraftian, and not in a goosd way - you know how HPL was fond of saying that things were so gruesome that he couldn't describe them? Well, a bit like that.
Unputdownability : I only didn't put it down because I so dreaded having to pick it back up again.
Okey-dokey, let's start with the publishing economics of this book. 246 pages, 43 chapters. Each chapter starts halfway down a page so thats (hmmm) 21.5 blank pages.
On average, each chapter ends halfway down a page, so thats another 21.5 pages. And every chapter starts on a right-hand page, meaning that if the previous chapter finished on a right hand page, the new chapter is faced by a completely blank page. This happens, on average, every other chapter. That's another 21 pages. That's 63 (sixty-three, and you know they are big numbers when the teletype prints them out in words on the football scores) pages containing nothing. That's a quarter of the book.
And the typeface is big. Very big. Probably almost big enough to have the words "You won't need your magnifying-book-page-reader for this one" on the cover and to go on the shelves in the library marked "Large Print". So what does this all mean? Well, it means that you don't get much book for your money in terms of number of words. And, sadly, you don't get much book for your money in terms of writing.
Now, I remember when Tom Sharpe was a master farceur. His characters whirled in a typhoon of misunderstanding and misapprehensions. Language tied itself in knots as meanings doubled back on themselves and bit their speakers well-and-truly in the backside. Onjects animate and inanimate conspired to trap Sharpe's victims in the unlikeliest, and yet, oddly enough, the most plausible manner.
I remember having to thrust an open paperback (one of the two South African novels) into the hands of the person sitting next to me on the Tube one day, just so they could see the cause of the tears that were pouring down my face, and then having to wrestle the damn thing back from them when they were reduced to the same state. But I was younger then. And so was Tom Sharpe.
And there, for me, lies the major problem with this book. It is old. It is tired. It is perfunctory. All marriage is loveless. Sex is procreation, not recreation. The police are stupid. Women are selfish dominators. Men are spineless. Sharpe has written all this before, but always given us, at the heart of the novel, a character we can care for. Not this time.
The cast comprises (a) a married couple where a spineless man is dominated by his wife, (b) a married, infertile, couple where a stereotypical Essex wide boy husband fails to satisfy his wife, so she dominates him by making him take of his shoes when he enters the room, and (c) the spineless male product of union (a).
Add some police whose presence (as is often the case) is to misinterpret an everyday phrase to draw the conclusion that something significant has taken place. The phrase in this case is "bloody thing", which our policeman, in order to actually make something happen in the plot, is forced to interpret in a Shakespearean fashion, and assume that a "bloody thing" is a thing covered in blood (this despite the fact that he, himself uses "bloody" as an oath only a page or two distant). And so weak is this misinterpretation that Sharpe even has to underline it, to virtually draw the reader aside and say "Did you see what he did there? He completely misunderstood!". When an author has to nudge you in the ribs like a drunk in a saloon bar, you know you are in trouble.
The book ends suddenly. So suddenly that I thought some pages must have fallen out in the binding process, but no - it just stops. The grand denouement doesn't occur. All the (surviving) characters do a 180 degree turn; not even a graceful U-turn, just a handbrake turn which fails to raise any dust, or convince the reader.
There is one vintage Sharpe comic image. One. Just one. I won't tell you what it is, or where it is, but when something about transvesticism raises a smile to your lips, you know that the book has just peaked, and you can put it down content in the knowledge that you won't miss anything by continuing no further.
Having been so disappointed with a recent Patricia Cornwell, I thought I would try one of the older, non-Scarpetta, books.
All I can say is, glad I got this from the library. 180 pages, 27 lines to the page, 10 words to a line, I make that (counts on fingers) under 50,000 words. Imagine paying 13 squids for 50,000 words, and then realising that it was that short because the author just couldn't be bothered to create three-dimensional characters, or sow the seeds of the solution more than about three chapters from the end. As Johnny Rotten said, "Ever had the feeling you've been cheated?"
