I try to be really fair in these reviews, and rational, and reasonable, and generally quite erudite. I've managed to find good points in most of my reads this year, even if it's that they were over quickly and I could move onto something better. I try not to have knee-jerk reactions to things.
But this was stupid. It was so ridiculously stupid that it sort of insulted me and I only skim-read the last fifty pages or so because I was so bored stiff. It was the sort of stupid which made you wish the writer had let someone else do it, because somebody else might have made it less stupid.
It wasn't all stupid. The opening pages of this were clever. It took a while to realise the narrator was blind and it really showed what could be done with clever descriptions and building up an almost tangible sense of surroundings. Throughout, Dickinson did well with this and I felt like I was wherever the narrator took us, purely through the descriptions of the four senses open to him. Kudos for that.
But the plot. Oh God, the plot. It was so stupid, and I shan't apologise for repeating that word because anything more would be crediting it too much. The plot relied on so many coincidences and unlikely events to make it work. Dickinson needed help with this.
And the book covers (whichever edition you read - just Google them) are horrendous. They make the narrator look like something out of The Exorcist.
Plus the copy I read was really grubby which made me feel a bit ill.
No comments:
Post a Comment