|
Nickholas P. Michell
read and liked
Boz4pm's
review of The Unconsoled:
"This has a similar feel to Crime & Punishment or Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas: dark, unsettling and vaguely insane. It is, though, a masterpiece, no more no less.
It’s huge and yet I zipped through the thing in little over a week simpl...more
This has a similar feel to Crime & Punishment or Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas: dark, unsettling and vaguely insane. It is, though, a masterpiece, no more no less.
It’s huge and yet I zipped through the thing in little over a week simply because it is compelling and very readable. The best I can come up with to describe this is it’s like reading the literary equivalent of a painting by Magritte – the ordinary, the everyday made surreal.
The story is told in the first person and through the eyes of one Mr Ryder. At first you wonder if he’s suffering from jet-lag, or possibly even amnesia, but then it slowly dawns on you that it actually reads like a dream and it’s never wholly clear if this is Ryder’s genuine perception - i.e. he is insane - or simply a literary construct. Everyone he meets pours out their life stories to him, assumes he knows what the schedule is, expects him to know what they are talking about and that he is prepared and yet, just in some classic nightmare scenario, he has absolutely no clue whatsoever and lets them lead him from one scene to another.
It does mean that, reading it, you get that same sensation as you do in exactly those kind of dreams – faintly nervous, anxious, unnerved by the whole thing, yearning for clarity, explanation or some kind of end to the roller-coaster effect of travelling on and on without quite getting to where you thought you were meant to be going. You are desperate for Ryder to actually DO all the things he claims he needs to do, or that people ask of him, and yet the diversions and distractions come one after another and nothing is quite as it should be. It is only when you are about three-quarters of the way through that slowly things start to pull together and you suddenly see the genius in the writing – that this mad, linear weirdness actually is forming something quite astonishing.
As the story unfolds, we feel great sympathy for Ryder, lost as he is in this weirdly phantasmal world where nothing feels certain and time and space seem to bend at will at times. Slowly, though, the sense of confusion and amnesia in the character dissolves to a sense of arrogance, and by the end we can not only appreciate Ryder’s frustrations, but also that of those around him. Ultimately he turns out to be selfish and shallow, and yet we are not unsympathetic – we have come on this journey with him, so when we know him at last in his responses to others, we are frustrated by him more than we loathe him. He has been as much at fault as others, perhaps, but as much through circumstances as his own inability to empathise.
And empathy is needed. People are falling apart around him – sometimes literally. The depth of characterisation is extraordinary. Everyone has long, long soliloquies in which we learn so much and which are surprisingly readable and entertaining. Indeed you want to know more, you want to find out what will happen, if Ryder will ever get himself together or if events will completely defeat him.
Slowly, bit by bit, each layer is peeled back and you find out more and more about the main characters around him, each of them dependent on Ryder or asking something of him, needing him to do something (or so he believes, rightly or wrongly), or into whose lives he feels himself drawn in spite of himself. By the end, their stories have become far more important than Ryder’s own, indeed Ryder has become a complete irrelevance almost in every possible sense. That in itself is a comment, a commentary on the man – and this is something that, so I understand, this author does a lot: allows you to gain huge sympathy with the main character and only then reveal their flaws via other people’s reaction to them. It’s a superb technique, and you don’t really see it or understand that as happening till towards the end.
This book is utterly enthralling and absorbing in a way that is hard to describe. I can highly recommend it.(less)
"
|
]]>