Review: The Silence of the Girls

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thought-provoking retelling of the "hero" Achilles through the eyes of his captured slave Briseis. A good companion piece to Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad.

View all my reviews

Review: Peach

Peach by Emma Glass
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an odd little, curious little, skewed little fruit of a book - a kind of phantasmagoric foodstuffs and nature based kaleidoscopic trip through some disturbing after effect of a sexual assault. I think it will require another read or two before it opens itself up fully to a deeper understanding. Curious but interesting.

View all my reviews

Review: Normal People

Normal People by Sally Rooney
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'd heard so much about this book (long-listed for the Booker, voice of the new generation of Irish writers, etc etc etc) that I was quite excited to read it. A lot of hype that I was prepared to go along with. Until I sat down to read it.

Normal People is a novel about a pair of fairly nondescript people from a smallish town in the West of Ireland who skirt around their burgeoning relationship, analyse themselves into unhappiness, go to Trinity, achieve Schols (such as Trinners thing, y'know), have unhealthy but fairly routine relationships, and end up with unresolved feelings about each other.

I've just done in one sentence what Sally Rooney does in 266 pages of often pointless prose.

Marianne and Connell are dull-as-dishwater characters who go nowhere and agonise about it endlessly - like Ross and Rachel but without the laughs, or the fleshed-out characters. Their lives, as portrayed by Rooney, are spectacularly one dimensional but portrayed as edgy: if your idea of living life on the edge is a spot of consensual BDSM. Sans accroutrements. As hard as I tried, I just could not come to like a single character in this book. Maybe Lorraine, Connell's hard-working, mathematically impossible (or at least highly improbable) mother, at a push.

This might have been forgiven if the writing was in any way entertaining or artful but there is little art or style in these pages - no allusion, no symbolism (not even of the heavy-handed type), no flourishes to lighten the slog through these pages. Characters' actions are described in excruciating detail - "Connell rubs his left eye with his knuckles and sits up." Why tell me this? Does it says anything about Connell? Why his left hand? Is there any significance to the use of knuckles over, say, the tip of his index finger, or the pinky? Does it advance the action or tell me something about the character? You might think I'm being overly picky (well maybe I am) but there are just far too many instances of over-description for description's sake. Unless the teabag that's thrown in the sink is a metaphor for something or vitally important for a scene a few pages along I DON'T NEED TO KNOW THAT SHE PUTS THE TEABAG IN THE SINK. "She hands him a cup of tea: is all I need to know, and even that is TMI. The fact she puts milk in the tea is not even of interest to the milk. As for the use of the present tense...

Stylistic grievances aside, the other infuriating facet of this book is that it is a roman a clef about Trinity College Dublin students. Every graduate of the English Department in Trinity has this very novel (or summat similar) gathering dust and growing mildewy in their parents' loft or taking up space on an embarrassed 3.5-inch floppy disc somewhere. I know this, being a graduate of said department, just like Sally. Thankfully, most of us recognise the insular and cliched nature of such literary juvenalia and put the pages aside. Parties held by the irritating but well-off students - check; sense of inadequacy because you're from the country and are therefore an uncultured culchie with the thick-tongued mumble of Kavanagh - check; meeting over coffee in a noisy cafe while hungover - check; night at the Stags - check; interrailing around Europe - check; someone on an Erasmus exchange - check. I could go on (it is quite cathartic, actually) but I shouldn't.

I could end this review with a pithy comment, perhaps a triad of pointed alliterative adjectives that might raise a wry smile, but after ploughing (with a dull blade dragged behind some clapped-out oxen) through 266 pages and fighting annoyance and mental exhaustion to get through to the end, it's more than the book's worth.

View all my reviews

Review: Normal People

Normal People by Sally Rooney
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'd heard so much about this book (long-listed for the Booker, voice of the new generation of Irish writers, etc etc etc) that I was quite excited to read it. A lot of hype that I was prepared to go along with. Until I sat down to read it.
Normal People is a novel about a pair of fairly nondescript people from a smallish town in the West of Ireland who skirt around their burgeoning relationship, analyse themselves into unhappiness, go to Trinity, achieve Schols (such as Trinners thing, y'know), have unhealthy but fairly routine relationships, and end up with unresolved feelings about each other.
I've just done in one sentence what Sally Rooney does in 266 pages of often pointless prose.
Marianne and Connell are dull-as-dishwater characters who go nowhere and agonise about it endlessly - like Ross and Rachel but without the laughs, or the fleshed-out characters. Their lives, as portrayed by Rooney, are spectacularly one dimensional but portrayed as edgy: if your idea of living life on the edge is a spot of consensual BDSM. Sans accroutrements. As hard as I tried, I just could not come to like a single character in this book. Maybe Lorraine, Connell's hard-working, mathematically impossible (or at least highly improbable) mother, at a push.
This might have been forgiven if the writing was in any way entertaining or artful but there is little art or style in these pages - no allusion, no symbolism (not even of the heavy-handed type), no flourishes to lighten the slog through these pages. Characters' actions are described in excruciating detail - "Connell rubs his left eye with his knuckles and sits up." Why tell me this? Does it says anything about Connell? Why his left hand? Is there any significance to the use of knuckles over, say, the tip of his index finger, or the pinky? Does it advance the action or tell me something about the character? You might think I'm being overly picky (well maybe I am) but there are just far too many instances of over-description for description's sake. Unless the teabag that's thrown in the sink is a metaphor for something or vitally important for a scene a few pages along I DON'T NEED TO KNOW THAT SHE PUTS THE TEABAG IN THE SINK. "She hands him a cup of tea: is all I need to know, and even that is TMI. The fact she puts milk in the tea is not even of interest to the milk. As for the use of the present tense...
Stylistic grievances aside, the other infuriating facet of this book is that it is a roman a clef about Trinity College Dublin students. Every graduate of the English Department in Trinity has this very novel (or summat similar) gathering dust and growing mildewy in their parents' loft or taking up space on an embarrassed 3.5-inch floppy disc somewhere. I know this, being a graduate of said department, just like Sally. Thankfully, most of us recognise the insular and cliched nature of such literary juvenalia and put the pages aside. Parties held by the irritating but well-off students - check; sense of inadequacy because you're from the country and are therefore an uncultured culchie with the thick-tongued mumble of Kavanagh - check; meeting over coffee in a noisy cafe while hungover - check; night at the Stags - check; interrailing around Europe - check; someone on an Erasmus exchange - check. I could go on (it is quite cathartic, actually) but I shouldn't.
I could end this review with a pithy comment, perhaps a triad of pointed alliterative adjectives that might raise a wry smile, but after ploughing (with a dull blade dragged behind some clapped-out oxen) through 266 pages and fighting annoyance and mental exhaustion to get through to the end, it's more than the book's worth.

View all my reviews