Elaine Feeney - As You Were

 

Rating: 1/5

Review:  

Unreadable 

I heartily disliked As You Were. I read as much as I could bear and gave up, I’m afraid.

It is the story of Sinead Hynes who is A Woman With A Secret who develops cancer. On the ward to which she is admitted her past and those of other patients gradually emerge...and I found it next to unreadable. My chief (but not my only) problem was the style; Elaine Feeney is a poet and the book is written in a sort of half-prose-half-poetry style which didn’t work at all for me. It is the sort of writing whose purpose seems largely to draw attention to itself rather than to conveying meaning or feeling or narrative in a convincing way. Thus, for example, when the narrator went into hospital previously, it wasn’t to have her appendix removed, it was to have “a thickened, viscid appendix plucked off my bowel.” I can just about live with the overblown adjectives, but “plucked off” is just too much for me here, and there is sentence after sentence after sentence of this stuff.

I did wade through quite a lot of the prose to try to get to what was beneath, but Feeney introduces so many issues that the book loses what focus it may have had. (And it’s all wrapped up in prose which is recondite and of an immanent gelatinous viscosity which...etc.) I expected to be deeply involved with Sinead’s experience as I have been very close to two dearly loved women as they died of cancer, but I wasn’t drawn in at all. The book seemed to be saying nothing new, but going over very well-worn ground in an off-puttingly self-conscious way.

I was persuaded to try this by rave reviews from writers whom I admire like Lisa McInerney, but it really wasn’t for me and I can’t recommend it.

(My thanks to Harvill Secker for an ARC via NetGalley.)