Defeat

I've been at an impasse with my fiction reading for several weeks now.  We all have these times; these 'slumps'.  Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child engaged me closely for the first elegiac section, but the second and third have failed utterly to keep my attention. Such is my lack of interest that I've been chosing *not* to read rather than continue with it.  The little progress bar on my Kindle tells me that I'm exactly 50% through the novel, which given its size in paper is a fair chunk of 'pages' and I guess that if I'm not captivated now its unlikely I'll be captivated after 30, 40 or 50 more. 

It may be a matter of the moment in time.  I'm finding Hollinghurst's prose highly polished but stiff and his characters wooden and chilly.  Everything I liked about the first section of the book - which sees doomed poet Cecil Valance visit the family home of his lover George in the summer before the outbreak of World War I - is lost in the later sections set in the 1920s and 1960s respectively.  Where it is all subtly repressed passion and longing in the heat, light and air of 1914, what follows is pale and stifling.  Which, I suppose, may well be the point, as the world loses its colour and bite in the wake of senseless conflict but, function of the narrative or not, it makes it nigh on impossible to keep up my momentum.  That and the fact that the only character I really cared for - George - is utterly sidelined.  Again a function of the plot, but ultimately disappointing. Time to call it quits I think, at least for now.

My other recent attempt at contemporary fiction has been equally disastrous.  Like lots of bloggers I have recently discovered the joys of NetGalley, a website where you can request and download ARCs to your e-reader.  At the moment most of the publishers using the platform are American, but there are still lots of familiar titles available from the US divisions of the big houses.  Penguin USA and Random House USA, for example.   My first proof was Karin Altenberg's Island of Wings.  It was published in the UK is April this year and blurbed by Anne Enright.  I remember reading some positive reviews of it at the time, and it piqued my interest. 

The story is set in nineteenth century Scotland and belongs to Rev. Neil MacKenzie (apparently based on a real-life person), a missionary, and his young pregnant wife Lizzie.  They arrive on the lonely island of St. Kilda to bring the word of God to the Gaelic-speaking populace, and their relationship quickly comes under the strain of their isolation.  At which point I should stop synopsising and confess that I couldn't read beyond the first 50 pages of the book, and so can't presume to tell you more.   Except to say that I feel as though I must have been reading a different novel to everyone else!   Whereas The Independent called it a 'powerfully imagined debut' and The Scotsman thought it 'elegantly written', I was bemused by the clumsy style and unwieldy prose.  

Altenberg's descriptions of landscape and the natural world were either flat or downright odd.  The sea is 'limitless', 'the melancholy grey air' makes the Reverend 'sleepy', a giggle 'ripples' over Lizzie's face, the islands 'take on individual shapes in prehistoric shades of grey.'  (What shade of grey is that do you suppose?)  A bird is 'whitewashed and graceful with heads that looked as if they had been dipped in custard.'  The latter such a wrong-headed image that I read it half a dozen times just to clarify that, yes, I had understood the meaning correctly.  Am I the only one who thinks that whitewashed grace and custard should never meet in a sentence?  Then there are the awkward segues from present to flashback - '[Mackenzie] had not been at sea for over ten years, not since the night when William MacKillop drowned.  He did not wish to think of Will now.  He had met Will's father in Lamlesh the previous April...' - and the arbitrary changes of the omniscient narrator's point of view, from Lizzie to Neil and back again in a paragraph. 

Maybe there is a great story in here waiting to be discovered, and I'm missing out, but I can't go on with it.  There are too many problems in the novel's basic parts, with the texture and flow of the words on the page.  Has anyone else encountered it? 

 ~~Victoria~~

Comments

[Teresa]

Oh wow, those are some clunky metaphors. I'm pretty sure the mental image I'm getting of birds with heads dipped in custard is not the one the author intended. I'd much prefer cliches to that kind of overworked prose.

I really enjoy Netgalley, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that I want to start limiting myself when it comes to new, untried books. I've read plenty of good new stuff recently, but there's so much out there, and so little of it knocks my socks off. (I'm becoming extremely quick to give up too. If the first chapter doesn't grab me, I don't read more.)

[Helen]

This kind of critique is so helpful for a writer trying to bring together their first book - it's actually very easy to make cringy mistakes like this while in a first, or even third draft, and have to go back and mop up the text with a blush on ones face.

Teresa, please don't give up on new writers! Read them in the bookshop on the sly before you put your money down (you didn't hear that from me)

[Laura T]

I actually like most of those sentences (with the exception of the custard one) but perhaps that's because, for some reason, I do have quite an exact idea of what 'prehistoric grey' would look like and miserable landscapes do make me feel sleepy... The blurb sounds so good that, despite the custard, I might have to give the book a go (although rapid changes in narrative PoV do also annoy me).

[Laura T]

PS It's a shame about the Hollingshurst. I had similar problems with The Line of Beauty and was hoping this one might be more to my taste, but it seems not.

[nomadreader]

I admit I was a bit relieved when this novel didn't make the Booker shortlist because part of me was dreading it. I haven't been inspired to pick it up, but one day perhaps I will.