Rating: 2/5
Review:
Well written but dull
I found A Stranger City well written but ultimately unsatisfying.
It’s an
oddly-structured, fractured book. The central plot, such as it is,
revolves around the discovery of a body of an unidentified woman whom
no-one has reported missing, and a woman who is reported missing with
a lot of social media fuss at the same time, but is discovered to be
fine a couple of days later. A policeman and a filmmaker collaborate
to produce a documentary about the missing woman and this device is
used as a vehicle for thoughts about identity and isolation in
London. In fact, the book is largely taken up with portraits of the
lives of incidental characters showing the diversity of London’s
population, plus reflections on the difficulty of buying property in
London, the vacuousness of hip PR people in London, the
gentrification and trendifying of areas of London and so on. In
other words, it’s a novel about London – hence the title.
It’s well enough
done. Linda Grant is a good writer and her portraits are pretty well
painted, although her characters do have a tendency to make speeches
rather than sound spontaneous. The thing is, it all felt very
familiar and I didn’t get anything very new from it. For me, the
London thing has been done to death (and I live in London), Ali
Smith, Jonathan Coe and others have written novels about Britain and
Brexit and I just got bored with A Stranger City. I didn’t find
the characters or what was being said interesting enough to keep
going and I’m afraid I gave up about half way through.
This certainly isn’t
a bad book; it’s just that for me it says nothing new, in spite of
saying it very elegantly. Others may like this more than I did, but
it wasn’t for me.
(My thanks to Virago
for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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