The Book Of Lies

I felt that Catherine’s voice rang very true throughout the novel. A highly intelligent yet lonely and naïve teenager. Much of what she said was simply repeating the mantra of her recent

I felt that Catherine’s voice rang very true throughout the novel. A highly intelligent yet lonely and naïve teenager. Much of what she said was simply repeating the mantra of her recently deceased father, a local historian who wanted the locals to acknowledge what went on during the German occupation.

As the novel progressed the two stories alternated with parallel themes. Catherine’s loneliness and dismay at being ostracised by her friends felt very real and echoed her uncle’s feelings at trying to convince the islanders that his family were not collaborators.

We learn from the past and it helps us to shape the future. However the message from this book is that we don’t always want to acknowledge the recent past. For the islanders the German occupation was something they preferred not to talk about. Friends, families and neighbours were pitted against one another and years later the truth behind some events is still not known.

A great insight into a little known period of history, recommended reading for anyone who enjoyed “The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society”.

Unlike the teenage protagonist, I’ll be kind: none of the positive reviews on this site is a lie. It’s just that, as only one other reader has written, I never warmed up one degree to any of the characters. I did finish the book, but only out of the same sense of duty felt halfway through Miss Smilla’s Sense of Snow, when I started counting down the page numbers.

Catherine Rozier – 15, drama queen, self-confessed murderer and our narrator – is as cold as what I imagine the Channel Islands to be.

Unlike the teenage protagonist, I’ll be kind: none of the positive reviews on this site is a lie. It’s just that, as only one other reader has written, I never warmed up one degree to any of the characters. I did finish the book, but only out of the same sense of duty felt halfway through Miss Smilla’s Sense of Snow, when I started counting down the page numbers.

Catherine Rozier – 15, drama queen, self-confessed murderer and our narrator – is as cold as what I imagine the Channel Islands to be. She does have a distinctive and credible voice, but the point of a wisecracking teen voice is to put people off, and … well, yes, the author does succeed in pulling this off. A backhanded compliment, to be sure. It’s because Catherine’s got secrets but is desperate to divulge everything all the same; hence her writing this diary of confessions. Speaking of divulging, Catherine is a top History student (regardless of what she does to her favorite teacher), so she interrupts her narrative every too often with distracting little numbers pointing to pointless footnotes. I would have taken the Guernsey-born author at her word about all things Guernsey, sans documentary references. (Rampant teenage drinking, for instance – very interesting.)

As for the history that repeats itself, it is told in my least favorite storytelling style, the split narrative, so the chapters alternate between Catherine’s journal entries and her late uncle’s account of wartime German occupation, which she is reading or has already read. Charlie Rozier, too, is vividly developed through his patois-inflected voice, which kept taunting my long-diminished high-school French. I ended up liking him better than his niece. Yet the payoff in his tale came like the British at Liberation: much too late, seemingly long after the conflict was over.

Characterization is clearly a strength of Horlock’s, so now that she’s placed her hometown squarely on our literary maps, I hope there will be more of that in her next release. And far fewer of the history lessons, please.