I'm quite cross-eyed from reading my way through Joanne Harris's 'blueeyedboy' with only the briefest of interruptions. It's blasphemous to be indoors on the first day for two weeks that the sun has shone steadily with not a rain-cloud in sight, but blossoming rape fields (bringers of sneezing, runny eyes, feverish shivers,) and an unreliable car make good excuses.
I didn't enjoy 'beb' at all. It is sinister, disturbing, confusing to small-brained and lazy individuals on their Sunday off, and there is hardly one sympathetic character to be met in the 500+ pages, but it held me with a horrid fascination. JH's prose is very rewarding:
'And fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single gleaming lie….'
I would really like to have thought of that image myself.
As a reader I prefer it when writers create characters that reappear in a long run of books. Crime writers do that with their detectives, (gum shoes, nosey-but-sharp old ladies etc.) Novelists not so much. I like to be able to rely on these characters to have certain eccentricities, reliable personal traits that eventually make them as real to me as friends and family. I like being admitted regularly to the world that evolves around them.
On the other hand I can make an exception for writers who consistently entertain, like Joanne Harris. She's a story-teller who enjoys her flights of fancy. I heard her say that no-one should set out to become a writer with money in mind. They have to really enjoy the writing for its own sake or they may as well not bother. I've always got the feeling she enjoys her fictions and her enjoyment helps make the results entertaining.
From the 'Acknowledgements' it does sound as if she found this tale rather less easy to tell than some and a bit complicated to unravel, which I can sympathise with. I'm still not sure who dunnit all, or who was about to do it. Humiliating.
The last acknowledgement gave me a bit of a shiver too (now I've read the book): 'to the man in Apartment 7 whose voice was in my mind from the start.'
On the other hand I can make an exception for writers who consistently entertain, like Joanne Harris. She's a story-teller who enjoys her flights of fancy. I heard her say that no-one should set out to become a writer with money in mind. They have to really enjoy the writing for its own sake or they may as well not bother. I've always got the feeling she enjoys her fictions and her enjoyment helps make the results entertaining.
From the 'Acknowledgements' it does sound as if she found this tale rather less easy to tell than some and a bit complicated to unravel, which I can sympathise with. I'm still not sure who dunnit all, or who was about to do it. Humiliating.
The last acknowledgement gave me a bit of a shiver too (now I've read the book): 'to the man in Apartment 7 whose voice was in my mind from the start.'
I hope I never meet him.
No comments:
Post a Comment