Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
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DJ Taylor
Chatto and Windus 2009
In the early years of the last century Alice from Kansas is on her way to relatives with whom she is to live when she meets a travelling salesman on a train. Fast forward six months, and she is living with him, the relatives apparently forgotten. Soon, however, he has done a runner. Now she is married to an austere Lutheran preacher of Swedish extraction. This time it is she who does the runner. A couple of years later we find her in London, a budding actress. She finds fame and fortune - but the past will catch up with her eventually. At the same time we are told the story of a young boy, Ralph, at first living in a decaying country house but later lodging with an eccentric “uncle” in Norwich who discovers a new dye, and makes his fortune. Years later, Alice’s and Ralph’s paths cross…. Taylor’s novel is very readable and the rather old-fashioned way it is written (sexual encounters hinted at obliquely; expletives represented with asterisks; its rather formal and rarefied vocabulary) rarely grates and actually usually works quite well. Some of the description (particularly of places: the picture created of Norwich eighty-odd years ago is especially vivid) is very good indeed. The problem for me was the characters. It wasn’t that they weren’t sympathetic (you don’t have to like all, or indeed any, characters in a novel for it to work), rather that their motivation was often impossible to fathom. Alice’s dramatic behaviour, for example, made little sense to me, and by the end of the novel I wasn’t much the wiser about her than at the beginning. That said, this was an engrossing read well suited to a long Sunday afternoon when the snow lay round about not exactly deep and crisp and even but a bit too slippery to venture out.
10th January 2010
http://www.djtaylorwriter.co.uk/
See also: At The Chime Of A City Clock
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