Nicholas Shakespeare - The Sandpit

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Disappointing

I began by liking this character-study/thriller a lot, but it began to pall quite badly in the second half.

The story is of John Dyer, an ex-journalist now divorced and living in Oxford where his son attends the private school where Dyer himself went. The opening is a slow revelation of Dyer’s circumstances and mental state which I found very well done. Then, Dyer finds himself in possession of some potentially world-changing information which a lot of people in governments and big, powerful international businesses are very keen to get their hands on. It becomes a sort of espionage novel, with Dyer’s great moral dilemma about what to do at its heart.

Much of the book is taken up with Dyer’s life and character, plus that of those around him – wealthy, rather self-obsessed people, some of whom have rather sinister backgrounds of one sort or another. The thriller part is rather less than thrilling a lot of the time, with Dyer being infuriatingly indecisive and rather pusillanimous in the guise of weighing up moral matters, and the denouement doesn’t help this. Also, Nicholas Shakespeare’s style becomes a bit wearisome. He is a very good writer in many ways, but especially after about half way I found the prose becoming a little show-offy and mannered.

As an example, every so often he slips from a normal narrative past-tense to present tense for a few sentences and then back again, like this:

“He dashed into the Dragon Cinema, and bought a ticket to a film that had already begun. He fell asleep after ten minutes, and when he wakes up the three people in the cinema are leaving. It’s the middle of the day as he emerges. He has no memory of what he’s watched. He feels in another time zone, another country. In slow steps, he headed back towards the town centre, plunged into a canal of images.”

Now, perhaps I just haven’t studied English Literature to a sufficiently advanced level to appreciate some subtle emotional intensity in this technique, but to me it was just extremely irritating – and it got more frequent and more irritating the longer the book went on. It kept throwing me out of the narrative, leaving me trying to re-orientate myself and wrestle with the prose and I eventually got very grumpy about it. (And “a canal of images”? Seriously?)

There are also rather over-long episodes seemingly designed to show us how much Shakespeare knows about academic Oxford, fly-fishing and other subjects, at least one monumentally convenient coincidence and so on.

I was disappointed overall. I expected a thoughtful, insightful, well-constructed and involving book from such a respected author, but I didn’t really get it in the end and was left feeling that there is less here than meets the eye. It’s by no means a bad book, but it’s not all that good either.

(My thanks to Vintage Publishing for an ARC via NetGalley.)