I have closed the old year and opened the new year by lying around surrounded by blankets and cats, reading, knitting, and napping. I have been actually working on two novels more or less simultaneously. The second one begun was the first one finished, mostly because it was more frivolous and required substantially less attention, all a boon when suffering from a major head cold.
On New Year's Eve I finished Barbara Taylor Bradford's Voice of the Heart. I admit I enjoyed reading it. There are times when a sappy romance just hits the spot, but in truth it has not settled particularly well, like a sickly sweet dessert that seems enticing at the time and later leads one to wonder what possessed one to overindulge. Yes, it was heartwarming in the end. But the characters were never particularly well developed, the story occasionally jumped from event to event in a rather awkward manner and Ms Bradford did not necessarily transition well. It goes down well if you don't ask much of it, but if you want a dessert to really tantalize the senses, this was not the one.
Today I finished Stuart Neville's The Ghosts of Belfast, I actually "read" this book as an audiobook, and it is one book that I believe was well served by this medium. The narrator, Gerald Doyle really captured the Irish and the sense of the people and place, rendering it much more fully than I believe I would have experienced by reading the book. Of course this may not be true, but ti sounds good to me right now.
Of course this book was also much better than the Bradford novel. The author manages to make the story plausible even though the premise seems implausible -- an Irish killer haunted by the ghosts of the innocents he has killed. The characterizations are full and the sense of the people and the place is well rendered, and this is brought home by hearing the irish brogue of the narrator. Of course the narration is not enough to make up for a poorly written story. These were people you could imagine, although they were not, for the most part people you would want to know. The protagonist is a nasty piece of work but we slowly gain respect for him as we watch him slowly come to terms with his past and his own responsibility for it. This is more than a simple story of revenge. It is the story of how one man comes to terms with his own guilt, his responsibility for what he has done and his eventual redemption, set in a world where many are willing to sacrifice others for their own advancement without any recognition of their own culpability.
This was a violent, harsh, nasty novel which is not for those of tender sentiments but it was also a gripping, thought-provoking story, reasonably well rendered.
Someone who gobbles down novels as I do, given the chance -- what a great way to start the New Year! I haven't read Bradford for years, but you describe the experience so precisely -- such novels are always quite enjoyable to read, but the sticky after-taste not so much. At least they're generally quickly forgotten. And I think there's room for a balance between them and more weighty books (although Bradford's are weighty enough if you use that term literally!).
Posted by: materfamilias | January 02, 2010 at 11:44 AM