Sorry, there will be quite a big spoiler in this review so if you want to read the book before coming back and reading this review, feel free, but I don't recommend it.
Miri's wife Leah is an underseas researcher. Leah was stuck at the bottom of the ocean for months when her vessel developed a fault. Now she's back and behaving very strangely.
The book is told in alternating chapters from each of the two lead's POV. This leads to the first of the big problems with this book. Both first person narratives sound exactly the same. If it wasn't for the chapter titles telling us who was talking, on the occasional pages where either Miri doesn't talk about Leah or Leah doesn't mention the sea, it is impossible to tell the narration apart.
It should be more than subject matter that separates the voices of your characters when writing multiple POV.
The writing feels nice. I'm not sure there's anything objectively wrong with the prose (other than the aforementioned uniformity of voice across multiple first person POV). SPOILER!!!! The story has a really interesting concept. There's submarine drama, there's body horror, there's a woman metapmorphosing into a fish. I'm not sure how any writer could take the ideas on display here, and with nice prose, write a book as tedious and uninteresting as this was. But Julia Armfield has managed it.
There are ways of making your story ambiguous and mysterious and not answering the audience questions that work, that fill the reader with a sense of wonder and mystery. There are ways of making your story ambiguous and mysterious and not answering the audience questions that feel pretentious and lazy and like you don't know the answers yourself but you thought you'd write it anyway. This book feels like the latter to me.
More spoilers
The fact that the submarine crew do nothing at all to help their situation makes their story anticlimactic. The fact that they try nothing in their time at the bottom of the sea makes their story lack drama. Their eventual escape feels like the writer just trying for that lazy air of mystery by not explaining why it happens.
When I read the Deep by Nick Cutter at the end of last year, there was a palpable sense of claustrophobia in the deep sea setting. There was a sense of awe at the surroundings. In this, there's three not exactly fleshed out characters who occasionally get on each other's nerves in the dark. then one snaps and does something silly. There's really no comparison between the two books for dramatic stakes.
This was sold in the horror section of at least one local Waterstones. Even by my wide ranging definitions of horror, this one was mis-shelved.
A book this short should not feel as long as this did. Just as an example of how enthused I was to continue reading this book, how much the storytelling had me hooked, there was one night last week where I had a spare hour to sit reading, and I chose to clean the bathroom instead.
The whole book can be summed up by the last sentence on page 203. "For a long time, nothing happened."
Not recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment