Patrick Flanery - Absolution

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Less here than meets the eye

I'm afraid I didn't get on as well with this book as some other reviewers did. It has all the hallmarks of a book which expects to be considered for literary prizes - elegant prose, themes and setting chosen for their Great Importance, multiple narrative voices and fractured timescale, and so on - but I found it a long slog and in the end I wasn't convinced that it is as profound as it thinks it is.

The publisher's synopsis on this page gives a good account of the book's plot and themes, and there were certainly good things about it. It paints a vivid picture of immediately post-apartheid South Africa with the constant fear of violent crime and the difficulty of straightforward relationships between races even for people of good will. The elderly writer Clare's character in particular was believable and well drawn and there are some horrifyingly haunting scenes. But, oh dear, it did go on. Flanery explores the nature of guilt and redemption but, in spite of the importance of the setting and set-pieces like the long, stilted, quasi-legal discussion between Clare and her lawyer son toward the end of the book, I didn't find much in the way of new insight here.

Flanery is also playing with the idea of memory and its failings and distortions with differing versions of events so that we are constantly unsure of what is fiction, what is lies and what are imperfect memories. This can work well in a story but and I found that it wore very thin in the end and didn't really say much of importance. Then, close to the end of the book Clare says "Perhaps the literal truth is not what you have remembered, but the truth of memory is no less accurate in its way." This is nonsense dressed up as profundity. It may be no less important or influential, but no less *accurate*? If a doctor mis-remembers the proper dose of a drug, for example, and kills a patient as a result, the truth of the doctor's memory is less accurate than the literal truth, which Flanery side-steps so blithely, of what is the correct dose. It made me extremely grumpy after I had slogged through the best part of 400 pages because it suggested that I had spent a long time trying to make sense of nonsensical ideas about truth and memory.

I agree that this book will probably be a contender for some of the year's literary prizes, but I felt that it was written with more than half an eye on exactly that and not enough attention to what it was actually trying to say. I think that, while it does have some merit, there is a lot of style and setting here and not as much substance as there should be.