I’m afraid I gave up on Nightshade fairly early, which I seldom do. I just couldn’t be doing with a somewhat self-consciously “literary” novel about wealthy, arty people in London and there wasn’t enough content here to keep me going.
Eve is a successful botanical artist who was married to an extremely successful (and therefore rich) architect before things began to go horribly wrong. She is walking through London at night, thinking abut things...and walking and thinking and reminiscing and walking. I found it a forced device which became increasingly irritating. Not only that, what Eve was thinking about didn’t interest me much, either. Her life in New York, her gorgeous little place in Wales and so on, and then the rather self-obsessed way she destroyed it all and the “excesses of the contemporary art world”, as the blurb has it. None of it engaged me at all, nor did I find much original in what was being said.
The prose is just
that bit too mannered and has a sense of giving the reader coy little
glances every so often to make sure we’re noticing how terribly
clever it is. For example, Eve stopping thinking about gardening in
Wales is described as “Eve cast herself out of the garden, like her
original namesake, turning her back on Arcadia to walk naked in the
wilderness…”. It’s overdone for me, and I know it’s a
metaphor, but “naked in the wilderness” doesn’t really work
when she’s actually walking in London, warmly dressed at midnight
near Christmas, does it? Or, in a paragraph beginning “There are
so many ways of measuring a life,” we get this: “Velocity was
another calculation – from the langorous slo-mo of childhood,
cranking up to the adolescent’s brisk, bright Super-8 narrative,
accelerating on to the breathless blur of old age, swift as a
blink-and-you’ll-miss it
credit sequence.” There’s a lot of this, and although
I see what she means, it’s not very original and
seems very contrived to me, from the unsubtle alliteration to
“Super-8 narrative.”
Enough. I didn’t like it. I tried it partly because of warm endorsements from some fine writers; this was before I discovered that Annalena McAfee has been a literary editor at both the Guardian and The Financial Times, which may mean that the endorsements are possibly not quite as disinterested and objective as one may wish. Anyway, it certainly wasn’t for me.
(My thanks to Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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