The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx is another of those books from 2013 that has fallen into my not-so-good pile. It was actually made into a film, and there are some amazing descriptions that burst across the
pages from all directions, painting vivid pictures, layering new images on
top of old ones, bringing Newfoundland to some kind of life, so, I suppose, you are wondering why the book ended up in my not-so-good pile? Unfortunately, by
the end of the novel, in spite of all the great descriptions, I was hunting around for words to describe it as a
whole, and I could only think of bleak, cold and grey. Interlaced with
the greyness are countless descriptions of unappetizing food: turkey
soup in which a stringy neck vein floats, squid burgers, pallid clumps
of scallops, stewed cod in a lunch box... descriptions that more than
often turned my stomach. Most of the characters are also grey, or
perhaps it is simply that they appear greyer than they actually are because the environment in which they live is stronger
than they are. I did not come close to any of the characters with the
exception, perhaps, of Bunny, who is the daughter of the main character, Quoyle. if you have read the book and you have a different (or even the same) experience, I would love to hear from you.
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian
