Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Shelagh Weeks
Cinnamon Press 2009
This novel, which follows a family through a divorce and its aftermath, starts very well. The first section, recounted largely from the perspective of Owen, the erring husband, describes a holiday in North Wales where things come to a head. The description of landscape is very good indeed, and the establishment of characters bodes well for the rest of the novel. Unfortunately after that it’s not just the marriage which goes wrong. I think the main problem is that Weeks doesn’t know what to leave out. A number of incidents and even characters peripheral to the plot are introduced but go nowhere, and even main characters just disappear (the last we hear of Granny, for example, who early on seems to be suffering from some kind of dementia, is that she could either be in Cornwall or Spain; no-one seems to know or care). Even when the story does seem to be going somewhere, it is derailed by incidental detail. We end up where we want to, but with far too many loose ends and false leads, and the impression we’ve read a much longer novel. Actually, I think it should either have been much longer, in order to develop and sustain interest in the characters and allow the constantly shifting narrative perspective to work, or much shorter. The first section, for example, would make an excellent short story, as would some of the other set pieces scattered through this promising, but flawed work. A good editor would have helped here – and a proof reader. Up Close is littered with errors: licence / license confusion, a church service apparently all about someone called Carol, and, most alarmingly, “recooperate”, which puzzled me for a while. We also discover on page 174 that Granny, earlier described as an avid emailer, doesn’t actually have a computer. All this tends to detract from what is good here (and some of it is very good), which is a shame.
19 March 2010
http://www.academi.org/list-of-writers/i/134556/
PS Amazon are still showing an early edition of this novel with a different title.
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