Empty Eloquence

Turning for Home by Barney Norris

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


It's a horrible feeling when you don't like a book that you had expected to be engrossed by. It introduces a sense of frustration - of having wasted one's precious time. Worse, if you happen to be a novelist yourself, you feel guilty because you know only too well that this was an endeavour that took time, sweat and hope, and so what right have you, the reader, simply to dismiss it as a failure?

Therefore, although I could only bring myself to give Barney Norris's 'Turning for Home' one measly star, I do so with respect, at the same time acknowledging the possibility that maybe it was a book that reached the top of my to-read pile when I was least in the mood for it, as can happen with one's reading matter. It also goes without saying that Barney Norris is an accomplished writer - I couldn't put down his 'Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain' - and despite leaving me cold, and being over-riddled with heavy, obvious images, 'Turning for Home' nonetheless displayed a certain undeniable eloquence. It was just that none of that eloquence convinced or got under my skin. It just fell - and felt - flat.

But how easy it is to criticise! So let me do my best to justify that criticism:

'Turning for Home' is full of noble themes - an unloving mother, a traumatised accident-survivor, the loneliness of old-age, the atrocities of the 'troubles' in Northern Ireland, young love, family bonds, the politics of truth... Actually, there were too many noble themes and they simply did not hang together. Like ingredients of a complex recipe that hadn't received the necessary blending.
Instead, it was like the reader was expected to do all the blending - working out for themselves why the various flapping threads of the story supposedly held together and mattered. I am familiar with the wise 'less is more' mantra, but that wasn't what was going on here. Actually, it just felt a little lazy.

Another massive problem of the story for me was the way it was told. There were two first person narrators - Kate, the traumatised, not-loved-enough, grown-up granddaughter, and Robert, the widowed, ex Northern Ireland serving grandfather, around whose eightieth birthday party-gathering the entire novel is based. It is a familiar structural device this, pulled off beautifully by Ann Enright, for instance, in 'The Gathering'. In that novel the strands of each family member are brought vividly and movingly to life as the scattered clan assemble for Christmas, so that by the time they find themselves under the same roof we are on tenterhooks because of what is in play and at stake. Norris however, never comes close to achieving an equivalent sense of drama. The two narratives are stream-of-consciousness mullings and recollections, devoid of any in-the-moment jeopardy or tension about the supposedly seismic incidents to which the protagonists refer. It got so dull! It made it impossible to care about Kate or her grandfather, or any of the family, because I kept on being TOLD stuff rather than SHOWN it; a fatal - and dare I say, elemental - error for any storyteller.

So, many apologies to Barney Norris. A writing career, like any career, has its hits and misses, and for me this novel did not find its mark. (Apart from one lovely paragraph near the end on love being about wanting to find someone who will put you first, which I thought was wonderful.) I haven't lost faith, however. I will read whatever Norris does next, because he has moved me in the past and I know he will do so again.



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