Recommended Reading December/Bedside Books Number Four

Yes I'm double dipping. For various reasons I couldn't read the book recommended by my friend L in December and for related ones I won't be able to read it in January either, but I'm hoping to get to it in February. For the curious it was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. 

What I ended up reading was this

Way back in the summer when I got the ferry back from Aberdeen  one  of my friends from the village was on it too, and she spent some of the time reading this book which she said was a real page turner and that she couldn't drag herself away from. A few days later she popped round and she gave it to me to read which is how it ended up on the bedside books pile. Looking for something light to zap through around the preparations for Christmas I took this from the pile and ...

Well, it's never a good sign is it, if the only way you can finish a book is to say 'to finish this by the end of the month I need to read 30 pages a day ' and then force yourself to do the 30 pages, constantly checking to see how many more of the days allocation are left and wondering if you can cheat and only do, say,  25 because after 25 you have got to a chapter end. 

From which it can be intuited I think that I did not enjoy this book. 

VH is well reviewed and my friend on the ferry was not the first person to say that I must try her books. The question that I have is 'what am I missing?'.  I must be missing something because I found this absolutely dire. I mean really really mind numbingly bad. 

To call the characters one dimensional is to understate the case. They aren't even characters. They are just names. Some  have a characteristic associated with them. The heroine for example is a talented embroiderer. I cannot tell you anything else about her as a person because there is nothing else to tell. That's it; that's your lot. Equally the hero's father. A businessman. Again, that's your lot. We see nothing of anyone's inner life, it's all totally external. Tell, not show. Disaster. 

And all told in the flattest prose it has been my misfortune to come across since - well, Janet and John would be stretching it, but not by much. 

They say VH  really does her research. She certainly does and then she ladles it into your lap in great unbroken slabs. There is no attempt to weave things into the story. If she knows what the reduced tonnage going through Thessalonica harbour after the post war earthquake is, and she does, she just tells you. Random fact, randomly placed, nothing to do with plot development, just something she found out and tells the reader because there is a 'character' looking out at the harbour.

I was really annoyed by two further aspects of this novel which I appreciate wouldn't bother some  other readers. One is the over-simplification of the historical and political background to the inter-war relationship of Greece and Turkey and in particular to the Greek Civil War which was much more violent, nuanced and complicated than Hislop shows it to be. I appreciate such background  might be thought too complex for a novel of this sort, in which case my advice would be to set it somewhere or somewhen else. Don't short change the real people who had to negotiate this extremely tricky time and place by trivialising their experience this way. 

And talk of trivialising experience brings me to my second major personal gripe. Don't use the holocaust as a good way to get rid of half your people or obtain cheap sympathy/pathos points in  your book. There are stories to tell about the holocaust, but it really really annoys me when something so awful and so important becomes nothing but a sideshow in an airport novel. VH is not alone, but it's the nastiest example I've come across in a long time. 

Definitely not recommended. Even if the only alternative is watching paint dry. 

Oh and Happy New Year!