Fionnáin apžvelgė autoriaus Sheila Armstrong knygą Falling Animals
Treading shallow water
2 žvaigždutės
Sheila Armstrong's debut novel is about a real-life mystery. A John Doe was found in 2009 sitting calmly on Rosses Point beach in Sligo, Ireland. Tracing his family or identity took years, and this novel takes on this strange and sad story.
Each chapter is written from a different person's perspective: those who found the body, investigated its mystery, and those who were on a boat that crashed ashore in the 1990s. Introducing a new character every chapter is a brave approach that could suit this tale of a village and a body, but the execution is a little clunky. Each person is given a back-story including very obvious moments of trauma or trial that alter their lives in very literal ways. Human beings aren't usually like this, and the result ends up feeling like an exercise in writing lots of characters for a play or television, without producing …
Sheila Armstrong's debut novel is about a real-life mystery. A John Doe was found in 2009 sitting calmly on Rosses Point beach in Sligo, Ireland. Tracing his family or identity took years, and this novel takes on this strange and sad story.
Each chapter is written from a different person's perspective: those who found the body, investigated its mystery, and those who were on a boat that crashed ashore in the 1990s. Introducing a new character every chapter is a brave approach that could suit this tale of a village and a body, but the execution is a little clunky. Each person is given a back-story including very obvious moments of trauma or trial that alter their lives in very literal ways. Human beings aren't usually like this, and the result ends up feeling like an exercise in writing lots of characters for a play or television, without producing any heart or story in between. Some of the writing, too, is repetitive and clumsy, for example the word 'foreign' pops up to describe non-Irish things far too often.
A couple of the chapters are brilliant, particularly the ones that begin each section of the book, and they are standalone as striking short stories. The potential to go deeper hangs temptingly there, but in the end the story stays in the shallow waters it begins in.