In Pale Battalions...
First of all, I want to say Lost has been terrific so far. For everyone who gave up on it last year (and its season finale last year was one of the best season finales I've ever seen) you should be watching it again-it's great.
What wasn't so great was In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard and I've been trying to put my finger on why I didn't quite like it. It had all the earmarks of a book I would like: a lonely girl with an evil Grandmother and distant Grandfather, a murder and a suicide and a backdrop of WWI. Why didn't I like it?
There were parts I did like-and it starts off with much promise, with a scene of an older woman taking her daughter to a WWI memorial-and showing her that her own father died more than a year before she was born. There seemed to be a cracking good story behind that and in some points there were-the evil Grandmother is very well drawn and is truly evil. However, everyone else is a shadow. From Leonora, who grew up lonely and got sent away to school and was sometimes sad, to her father who hated the war and didn't want to go back, to his friend who tells the tale-none of them seem particularly like real people. I hate to compare authors, but this book would have greatly benefited from the acute observations of both Ruth Rendell and Rennie Airth. What could have been a great story seemed to me to be airless and stale-even with an ending that revealed everything and had (I hate to admit) a nice twist.
And I have a particular nit to pick with this book over something that not only really annoyed but almost lead to me putting it down and not finishing it even though it was close to the end. And it's this-Leonora (the daughter whose Father died a year before she was born) meets up with a young-ish British girl and her American boyfriend sometime in the 60's. She's an artist and so is he and he's from New Jersey. So why oh why does he talk like a hick from the Deep South? A person from Jersey saying "ain't" and "I reckon"? what is that? I'll tell you what it is-it's a British writer who can find no other way to distinguish American speech from British speech except by having this character speak with bad grammar and sound like an uneducated idiot. And if he were a 60's draft dodger, the chances are good that he was a college student-at the least he scraped up enough money to make to the UK and lead a decent life. It was extremely annoying and took me right out of the book and I HATE that.
If you want to read a book set right after WWI and truly captures its horrors (along with a good murder or two) I suggest River of Darkness-not this.
What wasn't so great was In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard and I've been trying to put my finger on why I didn't quite like it. It had all the earmarks of a book I would like: a lonely girl with an evil Grandmother and distant Grandfather, a murder and a suicide and a backdrop of WWI. Why didn't I like it?
There were parts I did like-and it starts off with much promise, with a scene of an older woman taking her daughter to a WWI memorial-and showing her that her own father died more than a year before she was born. There seemed to be a cracking good story behind that and in some points there were-the evil Grandmother is very well drawn and is truly evil. However, everyone else is a shadow. From Leonora, who grew up lonely and got sent away to school and was sometimes sad, to her father who hated the war and didn't want to go back, to his friend who tells the tale-none of them seem particularly like real people. I hate to compare authors, but this book would have greatly benefited from the acute observations of both Ruth Rendell and Rennie Airth. What could have been a great story seemed to me to be airless and stale-even with an ending that revealed everything and had (I hate to admit) a nice twist.
And I have a particular nit to pick with this book over something that not only really annoyed but almost lead to me putting it down and not finishing it even though it was close to the end. And it's this-Leonora (the daughter whose Father died a year before she was born) meets up with a young-ish British girl and her American boyfriend sometime in the 60's. She's an artist and so is he and he's from New Jersey. So why oh why does he talk like a hick from the Deep South? A person from Jersey saying "ain't" and "I reckon"? what is that? I'll tell you what it is-it's a British writer who can find no other way to distinguish American speech from British speech except by having this character speak with bad grammar and sound like an uneducated idiot. And if he were a 60's draft dodger, the chances are good that he was a college student-at the least he scraped up enough money to make to the UK and lead a decent life. It was extremely annoying and took me right out of the book and I HATE that.
If you want to read a book set right after WWI and truly captures its horrors (along with a good murder or two) I suggest River of Darkness-not this.
posted by SHbookworm at 12:09 PM
1 Comments:
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