I found this 1978 Whitbread dull and un-engaging to read with insipid characters that don’t engage with the reader on any level. Written from the perspective of a woman photographer in her old age it goes back and forwards through her life but frankly makes little sense. It’s written in short named chapters that bear little relation to one another and has possibly some of the corniest dialogue I’ve read in a long time. The descriptive passages are well written but frankly the bizarre way they are all stuck together doesn’t make this either an absorbing or an entertaining experience.
Running through the narrative is a strange sub story of incest handled here as it is by some writers as normal and just as illicit love. There is never any rhyme or reason to this need for incest nor does the character seem at all bothered by it, which is unrealistic and annoying given that all human societies have a taboo about it. It seems to be there pointlessly to shock – as it appeared to be in Helen Dunmores – A Spell of Winter. The character also has an episode of pretend blindness, which appears to last for an indeterminate time and again, appears quite normal to the surrounding characters. This along with an interminable amount of spurious waffle makes this a tiresome and annoying book. I’d hope that someone else may have read it and got more from it and would be able to enlighten me. But as with many of these obscure books from my prize winning lists it has probably been long forgotten.
Running through the narrative is a strange sub story of incest handled here as it is by some writers as normal and just as illicit love. There is never any rhyme or reason to this need for incest nor does the character seem at all bothered by it, which is unrealistic and annoying given that all human societies have a taboo about it. It seems to be there pointlessly to shock – as it appeared to be in Helen Dunmores – A Spell of Winter. The character also has an episode of pretend blindness, which appears to last for an indeterminate time and again, appears quite normal to the surrounding characters. This along with an interminable amount of spurious waffle makes this a tiresome and annoying book. I’d hope that someone else may have read it and got more from it and would be able to enlighten me. But as with many of these obscure books from my prize winning lists it has probably been long forgotten.
