Ed Kay
Finished in one short sitting and sobbing my eyes out. Clever, heartfelt, poignant. Patrick Ness perfectly expresses the voices of young adults and their struggles with the “big questions” of life without being too simplistic or cliche or patronising. The characters are always slightly flawed and don't always do the right thing, which is what makes them so heart-wrenchingly real. These observations also allude to the Chaos Walking trilogy, which I loved, and which made me pick this up as I know there's a movie in the works. I can understand why: big themes, powerful scenes, allegorical fairy tales, magic and monsters all in perfect balance. Brilliant.
Hilarious northern wit and a vividly drawn world that effectively skewers the hypocrisy of the religious. Contains the best description of a problem I have ever read:
“What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt).”
Love JJ, though after a few episodes you realise the cases are either drunken fighting, property damage or people refusing to pay for the house/car/holiday they agreed to. Likewise this book: lots of repetition, except it's less entertaining without seeing the defendants wilting under the lashes of JJ's tongue.
Also, while I tend to agree with her common sense approach, this book was pretty hardcore conservative in parts, which made me uncomfortable.
I didn't get this book at all. Winner of awards, recommended profusely online and described as “subtle, funny and smart” by no less than Neil Gaiman... I found it tiresome, bland and rather vacuous. There are nice touches - Gwendolyn making the stained glass windows come to life, for one - but everything feels rather sketchy and unplanned. Things happen for no reason to partly drawn characters without any sense of narrative drive. It's wishy washy.
I should add I bought this for my nephew and thought I'd dip into some non-Rowling children's fiction before I gave it to him. Maybe I'm too old and it's something that grabs you when you're young, but to be honest I'm not sure I want to give it to him now, I'm not sure he'll thank me for it!
I haven't read a Grisham since the early days of The Firm and The Client. I remember taut, sharply written thrillers that pulled you through with excitement and drama. So when my flatmate left this lying around - the sequel to another riveting page-turner A Time To Kill - I looked forward to reacquainting myself.
How disappointing. This was a tedious, badly written, overlong, predictable mess. What a shame! Next time I'm going to check a few reviews before casually assuming a classic author is still at the height of his powers.
I found this overlong and far too pleased with itself, but my primary annoyance with the whole thing was the weird and distracting authorial voice. It's all narrated first person - even the sections that are describing what the other characters are thinking. Perhaps among the amazing skills Pilgrim constantly alludes to though rarely demonstrates is telepathy? Not to mention the fact he also describes in perfect authorial detail exactly how the bad guy set up the crime despite repeatedly pointing out that he was so clever and hidden that no one knows anything about him and that he's a ghost... I found it SO JARRING.
The author - as is pointed out in the eager full page ‘summary' at the start, and at the end a nauseating 3 page acknowledgements, smug ‘note' AND sycophantic Richard and Judy ‘interview' - was a screenwriter, so presumably he's writing from the perspective of the camera. Where in a film the camera can cut to another scene with other characters, off he goes, describing everything, but not as a dispassionate authorial voice. No, he's still the main character! How about some third person Terry? Didn't they teach it at scriptwriting school? Or - gasp - more than one first-person narrator?
And what classic movies has he had a part in? Vertical Limit with Chris O'Donnell, one of the most awful and unrealistic films ever made.
That's not even to mention that the whole murder investigation in the middle of the novel is based on the knowledge of the time of death of the victim because “his cellphone was in his pocket and the clock stopped when he smashed onto the rocks.” Oh yeah, those modern cellphones with the ANALOGUE CLOCK FACES that stop when they get smashed.
This probably deserves 3* but the aggravation these factors caused (where were the editors?!) have driven me to dock one additional star as a stupid tax.
I find it difficult to say exactly what the problem is with this book. The writing is fine; nothing extraordinary, but I've read worse (Dan Brown, Crichton, Grisham, even Lee Child has his moments). There was a plot: art mystery, Nazis, mysterious messages from a sinister stranger.
But the characters... I just didn't care. I was so bored... FOR 700 PAGES. A page turner this wasn't - and even if it was I would still have been at it a week, just developing RSI.
On and on they wittered and waffled and nothing happened. At least when nothing happens in Dickens the writing is worth wasting time over.
When things happened, they seemed to... do so... without... any URGENCY. Even the EXCITING bits were dull.
There just wasn't enough here to support such a tome. Wittled down a good 70% it might have been OK, we could have done without the weird unnecessary backstory that hinted at character without actually developing any...
I remember reading 1984 when much younger and being surprised at how readable it was. A simple story, well told, disguising some more thought-provoking ideas and clever satire.
So I should have been prepared to find the same with this book: also very readable, straightforward and funny, but discussing some darker truths.
My reaction to the main character kept veering wildly from frustration and annoyance to sympathy and affection, but this meant I was always engaged in one extreme passion or another. This is not a boring book. Add to that some comic moments and a general, overall amusing tone and rarely was the smile not on my face.
Orwell's writing is just so beautiful and controlled: it takes a lot of skill to make writing look this damn easy.
My favourite image is a description of a nursing home wherein the inhabitants have nothing to talk about except their diseases:
“All over the darkish drawing-room, ageing, discoloured people sat about in couples, discussing symptoms. Their conversation was like the dripping of stalactite to stalagmite. Drip, drip. ‘How is your lumbago?' says stalactite to stalagmite. ‘I find my Kruschen Salts are doing me good' says stalagmite to stalactite. Drip, drip, drip.”
Genius.
Perhaps I need to be more forgiving reading historical fiction in the modern day, but Jesus, how many coincidences? Every single character introduced turned out to be related to another character from an entirely separate section of the plot. Apparently this was a big convention of the day (I know Dickens employs this in Oliver Twist, and similarly Bronte with Jane Eyre - “oh, these ENTIRELY RANDOM STRANGERS are actually my LONG LOST COUSINS!”) but it leaves me cold.
The writing is stunning, though. A bit overly-flowery at times, making the slower sections a trudge, but when he gets it right, Dickens nails it. As he does with the characterisation. Do you ever hate a self-promoting ass as much as you do Pumblechook? Or love a simpleton as you do Joe Gargery? Genius.
I was hoping for more. I read ‘The Dark Knight' series 15 years ago at Uni and LOVED them. Great stories and a real insight into the character of Bruce Wayne. Perhaps I need to have read a bit more background stuff to cope with this, as it seems to be a revisiting of all the enemies and friends Batman has had over his career. To be honest, the storyline was a bit too episodic - “...and here's the next one...” - and I was left totally confused by the ending. I'm still not entirely sure who the bad guy turned out to be.
Beautiful artwork, though, and Catwoman was good to look at while I was losing the plot...
Looking for a substitute for Reacher now I've nearly finished that series, I heard good things about this character Parker. He's a bit harder, a bit meaner, and a lot more taciturn, so steps in neatly to fill the hole left wanting revenge fantasies pursued by utterly assured and realistic but invincible protagonists.
Sorry, Rupert. Your writing is indeed as beautiful as the cover reviewers implied, but the content of your narrative was not as awash with catty tales of celebrity and excess as I'd hoped. I was hoping for gossip and filth, insights and snark and dismissal of ego. Sure, you've clearly had an interesting life, but I don't like you enough to want to hear about it.
Patchy.
In the book's introduction, Neil Gaiman explains the purpose of the book is to showcase stories which engender the reader to ask “...and then what happened?” However, the only really compelling story in the collection was by Gaiman himself, an outstanding fantasy story with magic and mystery hovering at the edges. There were other engaging tales, well-written narratives and compelling character studies, but not many. And unfortunately there were too many mediocre - and a couple of downright bad - stories included, which only made me ask “...but WHO CARES?!”
I seldom read auto/biographies but am sometimes compelled to buy one when I find that I'd actually be interested in how someone got to where they are. Good old Ray. I enjoy his TV work and envy his skills and lifestyle. I often wish I could go to Alaska and survive alone in the wilderness for a year or two.
But living in the woods and being self-contained, especially when you're earnest and hard-working as Ray just doesn't make for interesting reading. The poor guy constantly feels the need to defend himself, against what criticism I can't fathom, because he's clearly humble and driven by a passion for his work rather than self-promotion. Perhaps I would have been better with one of his ‘survival handbooks' and picked up some knowledge and gone out into the wilderness myself.
It's amazing that so many people have given this book 5 stars and can describe it with gushing abandon. While it is in no way a turkey, neither does it deserve to be given such unrestricted praise.
Some reviewers have suggested that if you find this boring then you just don't ‘get it' or that you should stick with Dan Brown, but this implies that Strange & Norrell is a difficult read, or has hidden depths, or has something to ‘get'... and none of these are true. Unfortunately, while I can recognise Clarke's great achievement in producing such a hefty manuscript and her obvious gift for writing uncomplicated prose, sadly, there is little else to praise. Somewhere in amongst all the incidental events and happenings there is a really good story struggling to assert itself. Clarke really deserved some brave editors to give the book a plot and strong characterisation to bring her vision and imagination to life.
But there are too many inconsistencies - Strange creates torrents of rain to hinder the French army but then is completely perplexed as to how to put out a fire at a farmhouse; the books in the library at Hurtfew are scattered and two magicians proceed with a long, manual search in the dark to find one volume, and don't consider using a spell to locate it. Equally, there are too many pages describing situations and events that go nowhere and achieve nothing.
Many reviewers have complained of the footnotes detracting from reading the main text. I found that they gave away the main plot line within the first few pages (which characters would side with others, how relationships would progress) and, given that this is all the plot consisted of, left very little to be surprised by.
In some ways, these footnotes are far more entertaining and contain glimpses of Clarke's wonderful fairy-tale story-telling abilities: when she restricts her word count!
There are things to admire about this work, but ultimately I was uninterested, disconnected, frustrated and bored. Characters are one-dimensional, plot is wafer thin, comparisons to Dickens are misguided and Harry Potter has far more craft. Clarke and her publishers have pulled off an astounding magic trick to conceal something so weightless and insubstantial in such a bulging tome... and to persuade so many people to believe it is a tautly written and engaging masterpiece!