Rating: 2/5
Review: Too much dazzle
I tried. I really
did. It is rare for me to give up on a
book and I carried on long after I felt like stopping, but in the end I just
lost the will to bother with this any more.
I can see the point here: Nicola Barker is trying to convey
aspects of faith and its effect and to do it in an original, sometimes
irreverent way. It's virtuosic writing,
with wild, unsignposted cuts between times and places, with different narrative
voices and with varying styles including the odd remark addressed directly to
the reader…and so on. I really don't
mind this sort of thing in principle and sometimes enjoy it a lot, but
here…well, frankly, I just didn't care much about any of it. It was so tricksy that any interest in the
story or message just got lost for me and after what I think is a pretty
creditable effort in persevering through far more of the book than I wanted to
I felt my duty had been done and I put it aside with considerable relief.
I see that The Guardian's review of The Cauliflower describes
it as "typically atypical,
expectedly unexpected and inexplicably good". Well, the first two, maybe, but I thought it
explicably bad – the explanation for me being that the "dazzlingly
non-pedestrian style" (Herald) is so "dazzling" that I couldn't
see anything else, and being dazzled isn't something I enjoy.
So…not for me, I'm
afraid. Others have clearly enjoyed this
far more than I did; you may too, but I
really didn't.
(I received an ARC
via Netgalley.)
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