Emma Donoghue - Akin

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Rather disappointing

I was rather disappointed in Akin. Emma Donoghue certainly writes well, but I found the book a bit of a mish-mash of themes which in the end didn’t say anything very new.

The story is of Noah, a retired, recently widowed professor, approaching 80 with a comfortable life in New York and on the verge of a sentimental journey to Nice where he was a child before the war. He becomes temporary guardian of Michael, his great-nephew whose mother is in prison, whom he has never met and who comes from a much tougher background and they head to Nice together.

What follows is a mixture: the rather unoriginal story of the two hopelessly unmatched people beginning to understand and bond with each other, a love-letter to Nice, some history of the dreadful events of the Nazi occupation of the city and a rather unconvincing mystery about Noah’s mother’s activities during the war. I’m afraid it felt like a bit of a mess to me because it lacked focus as it jumped from one theme to another, and the supposed mystery didn’t convince at all as Noah jumped from one tenuous, ill-founded conclusion to another. I found Michael’s character and voice pretty unconvincing as he quite often showed an astuteness and vocabulary well beyond his years. I was also slightly uneasy at the use of some of the Nazi and Holocaust material which felt just a little exploitative to me – although that may be just a personal view as my antennae are rather sensitive to that because of my own family’s history.

Donoghue is a good writer, so it’s all readable and I did finish it (with a little judicious skimming), but I wasn’t bonkers about it and it’s certainly not a patch on the brilliance of Room.

(My thanks to Picador for an ARC via NetGalley.)