This
was a frightfully monotonous book to read: it was how I would imagine it would feel if one was to wade through treacle. It took me
ages to get through it, simply because I could only manage a few
pages at a time, and if it had not been the Book Club book of the
month I would have given up after the first few pages. More than
several times I wondered what the point of it all was, and if that
point was the unravelling and then the reassembling of a family
struck by tragedy then, for me at least, the point was blunt and of
no consequence.
A
son dies in circumstances that, from the very first page, are hinted
at as being mysterious, and although the author would like us to
believe that it was this tragedy that sent the family into free-fall
it is very obvious that the family was unravelling well before there
is any sign of tragedy on the horizon – the father, Joe, with his
extra-marital fling; the mother, Laura, constantly balancing her own
innate fears with a need to control everyone around her; and Emily,
who for whatever reason, has never grown up. Looking beyond the
book's last page, I would assume that the surviving members all
continue very much the same as they always had, each with his or her
own very self-centred agenda. Consequently, all one has at the end of
the book is that question about the point of it all.
The
idea of the impact of tragedy on a close group of people is not at
all new, and it had probably worked had it been handled differently
and had there been some kind of multi-levelled management of both the
plot and the characters themselves. Unfortunately, all the characters
are either flat, unbelievable or sketchily drawn, and none of them
are even vaguely likeable. In a book like this, the reader has to be
able to form some kind of a bond with at least one of the characters,
but this did not happen for me.
Apart
from the dysfunctional group of unlikeable characters, the actual
situations holding the story together are scattered, disconnected,
uninteresting, and, at times, completely bizarre. The over-use of
conversation does not work for me and simply adds to the
'treacle-effect'. In the book's defence, I will admit, that there are
occasionally very faint glimmers of ideas that are trying to break
through, but they fade before they are strong enough to impact on the
book as a whole. A disappointing experience and not one that I would
recommend to others.