Rating: 2/5
Review:
Disappointingly unconvncing
I’m afraid I didn’t really get on with The Way Of All Flesh. I
like Chris Brookmyre’s Jack Parlabane novels very much, but this,
co-written by him and his wife Marisa Haetzman who is an
anaesthetist, isn’t anything like as good.
Set in Edinburgh in
1850, Will Raven is an impoverished medical student (with a dark
secret in his past, of course) who begins as an apprentice to the
renowned Dr Simpson. There is a series of unexplained deaths (of
women, naturally) which Raven and the housemaid Sarah begin to
investigate.
There are some good
things about the book. The medical history is very well researched
and graphically and unflinchingly portrayed, for example. However, I
found the whole thing a rather turgid read and pretty much a familiar
set of stale clichés with an attempt at a historical setting which
for me didn’t really convince. For example, Sarah is – you’ve
guessed it – a spirited, intelligent young woman with ideas and
attitudes imported straight from the early 21st Century.
(Not again!) Raven begins to learn a few life lessons, while also
being dragged into something which looks suspiciously like the
Rebus/Big Ger Cafferty relationship...and so on. The language didn’t
convince, either; it’s largely modern prose and the characters tend
to speak in a non-Victorian way (the book closes with someone saying
the two-word sentence, “Your choice.” for example) while the odd
slightly archaic word or phrase just sticks out and sounds wrong.
For example, a carriage pulls up drawn by two “lively steeds.”
Apart from the jarring occurrence of the archaic word “steed” in
modern prose, it’s incorrectly used; a “steed” is a horse being
ridden or available for riding, not one drawing a carriage.
I’m sorry if I
appear to nitpick, but all of this meant that I got no real sense of
place or period and I found the story and characters rather stale and
unconvincing. I had hoped for better from Brookmyre; I’ll wait for
his next Parlabane book but in the meantime I can’t recommend this.
(My thanks to
Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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