On the surface of this, I was super jealous. Matthew Crow is the same age as me and is already onto his second published novel. I almost put it down out of a fit of temper and 'it-should-have-been-me'ness. This, however, would have been massively hypocritical of me, as I've not even finished the novel I started as part of my dissertation in 2007, so I can hardly complain when other 26-year-olds achieve more in their writing than I do.
So I put aside my jealousy and read the blurb and thought I'd quite enjoy it. It seemed the sort of slightly-quirky book I'd like, plus it only cost me £2, so what was to be lost?
The basic storyline is that Verity and Jonah get put in touch with each other via a pen-pal scheme. Jonah has been released from prison after a long incarceration, although their 'relationship' began before he was released. The story starts smack bang in the middle of their story, which is rather confusing although engaging. Over the course of the novel, they write letters to each other, detailing their increasingly bizarre lives.
I say increasingly bizarre, but perhaps that only truly applies to Verity. Jonah's story, of his past criminal allies catching up with him again, is certainly the stuff of Hollywood films and, just perhaps, a believable thing that might happen. Verity's story is something else, packed full of coincidences. It isn't completely clear how exactly Verity ends up in the situations she does, whereas Jonah's circumstances at least seem explained by his history.
Their letters are long, and filled with self-indulgent flights of fancy. If Crow was aiming for these to come across as believable epistles, he completely fails: no one writes like this in real life. The most glaring thing to me was how neither of them really acknowledged the other's letter in much detail, beyond telling each other to 'be careful'. Instead, they went on narrating their lives in a way which would have fit much better in a straightforward first person narration. Indeed, why Crow felt the need to shoehorn two such diverging stories together when they almost never intersect is a little confusing. The letter device seemed largely superfluous and did not really help to tell the story in the way that the emails did in Dear Dylan.
There were beautiful passages of writing, which makes me wonder if Crow's debut novel, Ashes, is worth a read. I much preferred Jonah's narration, at least until the final pages, partially because I found Verity such a helpless drip. Towards the end, there was a suggestion that all that we had read was not perhaps true, and I wish this theme had been explored more because it's such an interesting concept: how much we actually present the truth about ourselves, and how much we paint a very different picture. This was probably left deliberately ambiguous, and maybe a re-read would reveal more of this theme, but on first glance, it's not especially well embedded.
The thing which wound me up the most, however, was the proliference of punctuation errors and typos throughout the book. This is published by an independent publisher, Legend Press, who seem to be an up and coming enterprise. Perhaps their small size can be blamed for these errors, but even so, it's sloppy proof-reading and copy-writing. If they want somebody to do it for them, I could be their girl!
I'm probably in a minority as this book was shortlisted for the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize and people who know a lot more than I do about literature seemed to love it. As I say, it was generally well written and the story was quite engaging, but the structure of it seemed superfluous. I might try Ashes in the future.
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