Deborah Harkness - A Discovery Of Witches

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Promising but flawed

I am very ambivalent about this book. It had some very good things about it but I found it badly flawed. I dithered about whether to give it four stars because of the good bits or three because of the flaws: neither seemed right, but the truth is that I got to the end with some relief and realised that I probably won't be bothering with the sequel, so - albeit reluctantly - three stars seems the honest rating.

Harkness is at her best when writing about what she really knows. She is an American academic whose field is History of Science and she is very good at evoking a good story from academic study, alchemy and American witches. The set-up is excellent and drew me in very quickly: she gives a good portrait of the life of a visiting academic in Oxford and there is an outstanding passage where her protagonist is analysing parts of Darwin's Origin of Species - not your standard occult thriller fare and really well done. There are one or two genuinely exciting episodes, too, which kept me reading.

I have some pretty serious reservations, though - the first being that the book is far too long. I found great chunks of it just plain boring: no plot development, endless descriptions of clothes, riding tack and any number of other things, while two characters I found stereotypical and a bit tedious became intimate very, very slowly. I even got sick of endless descriptions of beautiful historical books and artefacts, and I'm extremely keen on books and artefacts. I found it simply self-indulgent in far too many places.

Harkness creates her world with a wealth of detail about culture and academic ideas, but I found that I kept being pushed out of her world by errors which made that world seem false. For example, at times she goes into minute, well-researched detail about genetics, but then displays a complete lack of understanding of the process of evolution; modern American idioms fitted very well in the voice of the narrator who is a modern American, but kept creeping into the mouths of ancient Europeans where they sounded silly, and so on. The atmosphere which Harkness intends to build of immense culture and learning kept being broken by such factual or stylistic slips and while I wouldn't nit-pick about the odd such solecism, there were enough of them eventually to begin to irritate.

It's perhaps hypocritical of me to complain about the book being far too long and then write a review which is itself probably too long, but I did find this a difficult book to sum up briefly. Many others have obviously enjoyed this book far more than I did, but I'm afraid I can only give it a lukewarm recommendation.