See, I said that reading would slow down when I went back to work. And when school starts -- I'll be lucky to finish one a week, even tripe. Although that isn't the whole story this time. I finished this one yesterday and tried for several hours (at intervals) to post, but apparently there were issues at the server end. So, before breakfast even this morning ---
I picked this up because the title was intriguing - it was on the dean's bookshelf in the staff lounge. I still have no idea how the title relates to the story. This isn't tripe, but I'm not sure what it is. The author has a disclaimer at the beginning almost apologizing to his faithful readers because this is outside his usual line of territory. Oddly, now that I have finished it, it reminds me in some ways of that Sara Paretsky book - Ghost Country. Also way outside the writer's usual line. Loaded with religious metaphors in strange contexts. It is rather short on plot, but - well, after the first hour or two of it, I almost decided to bag it and get on with something more in MY usual line, but the idiotic characters kept bouncing around in my mind, so I went back to it. They aren't particularly people that I feel that I know or that I even want to know, but somehow they seemed very real - weird, but real.
The only situation that "resolves" resolves back to the original nonsituation. The two central characters almost never interact during the entire book. They are parallel mathematically in that they do not interact, and in many respects parallel each other in situation and action/reaction as well. They leave town together - but there is no real sense that their escapes (plural because it is not that kind of together) are likely to be successful.
No comments:
Post a Comment