It's a long book, probably the longest thing I've read this year, but it felt a lot longer than it is.
This is the first time since I started this blog that I've been tempted to give up half way through a book.
It's not that the prose is bad. The prose actually has quite a lot to recommend it in places. It's so dense though, and very overwriiten.
The dialogue is written in such a broad scottish dialect that it was nearly 200 pages in before I could relax my brain into translation mode and read it direectly. Prior to that I was having to read and rerread the dialogue to try to work out what the hell was being said.
From the prologue -
Fits a fine loon like yersel deein here, at the hin end o' the fair? Id've thocht ye'd be awa lang ere the noo, gin ye'd nae mind me askin.
That's one of the easier lines of dialogue in the prologue.
You can tell Alex Benzie fancies himself a serious literary author. None of the dialogue is in quote marks, copying Cormac McCarthy and others, he never uses one word where twenty nine paragraphs will do the job. There are chapters that go on for ten pages, where the most that happens is a man says hello to a woman. This was heavy going.
We hear about show don't tell - this takes that to the extreme. Instead of a short chapter telling us some key points of our central character's childhood, after the prologue, we go to his birth, and follow him from small baby, to toddler, to his early schooldays etc etc. It's showing us why he is the way he is as he gets older, but it really takes its time.
The story isn't even that interesting. The blurb makes it sound like there's going to be intrigue and conflict. Instead it's actually nearly 600 pages about a lad in his late teens fixing a clock and having a crush on a girl. And the clock repair doesn't enter the story till well over half way through.
The "villain" of the piece doesn't get even the slightest bit of come-uppance. And, yet another story where the first time the innocent young girl "becomes a woman" she gets pregnant. I'm sure it happens sometimes in reality, but why does it happen nearly every time in fiction?
Having dragged myself through the 571 pages, do I feel a better person for reading it? Have I been offered any great insights into life? Am I sad that these characters are leaving my life now I'm moving on to another book?
No, No and No.
I'm sure there are people out there who will gasp at the beauty of the prose (which to be fair - is very easy on the eye as dense literature goes - despite going on a bit) and will wax lyrical about the book's depiction of a microcosm of society on the cusp of technological change and its metaphorical resonance.
Yeah sure, it has got that. The town is drawn well and we do know the characters well by the end of it. We dislike the charcaters we're meant to dislike but... I felt no real connection to any of the characters we're supposed to like. Despite following him through almost his entire childhood, Watchie is a bit of a wet blanket as characters go. He has no real personality.
Somehow, the surfeit of description has left him, and most of the side characters, with only one dimension visible. The villain of the piece is the only one who feels even slightly fleshed out, mainly because of the difference between the way he presents himself publically and the depiction of his inner world.
I don't think I will be reading anythiong else by Mr Benzie. If you wish to do so, this is available through the usual places where you can buy books. Hell, you can have my copy for the cost of postage if you ask me before I take it to the charity shop.
One good thing about the length of this, when it leaves my shelves, I've got rooom for two regular length books.
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