Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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16 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Greenland and Archaeology, 28 Jun 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
A group of 6 people travel to a remote corner of Greenland to take part in an archaeological dig to uncover a Norse settlement and burial. Things soon start to go wrong when Nina sees marauding Greenlanders and hears people talking and moving around at night. The others are torn between believing her and thinking she's mad. But Nina's visions are the least of their worries. It soon becomes clear that an epidemic involving a killer virus is cutting swathes across the world. The group is isolated from the outside world and living in tents on dried rations and has little idea of how the virus is progressing - especially when their limited internet access ceases to work.
This is a 'Lord of the Flies' scenario played out with adults who are ill-assorted in the first place and have their own individual reasons for being there. Tensions develop and it soon becomes clear that the book is made up of final letters from each of the group as they fear they will not be rescued as planned by plane at the end of 6 weeks.
The book is very well written and beautifully produced. It is just as gripping as any crime story and I found I had to keep reading because I wanted to know what happened and whether they did all survive the experience. The story is painfully topical coming as it does during a swine flu pandemic. I found Nina's visions to be especially interesting and scary even more so when some of the rest of the party start experiencing them as well. I would have liked to know a bit more about Greenland itself and about the dig but I still thought the book was excellent and a gripping read. I look forward to reading this author's next novel.
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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
insipid hunger, 12 Jul 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
I was all fired up to get into this novel, after reading a very promising review of it by Megan Walsh in 'The Times'. I imagined 'Cold Earth' to be perhaps something of a cross between Alan Garner's 'Red Shift' and 'The Blair Witch Project'. Historical ghosts in strange time frames and terrifying real-time hauntings (by unseen presences at the dig and by a deadly virus stalking the outer world). Garnished perhaps with some philosophising and archaeological lore.
But this imagined text didn't really materialise to be honest. There was an occasional frisson but it all seemed rather insipid, I'm afraid. (And I got the implications of the final letter quite easily - not having to 'dig and sift' for it as Megan Walsh indicated.)
Sarah Moss's premise is an interesting one. But the novel - annoyingly - never realises this properly. It isn't dark enough to be a Gothic thriller. There was so much that an 'ordinary' horror writer would have done with this material without all the pretend cleverness.
It says on the back cover that 'Cold Earth' is 'a highly sophisticated novel of ideas' but I don't think that is true either. There aren't many ideas.
I think the real problem with the book is that it sits on the fence. It aspires to appeal to the literatti. (The main character, Nina, is a literary critic.) But the story/plotting - unimportant artefacts as these can be to modern academia - are not integrated or tightened enough. And the literary device of using epistles/letters just doesn't work enough in this context.
I didn't want to write a highly critical review of this book. I really wanted to enjoy it. But I just became very frustrated at the lost opportunities thrown away on every page.
Sarah Moss describes hunger and cold extremely well. She has a real line on landscape. But the supernatural elements are just not delineated enough to make this book 'haunting' in any sense of the word.
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21 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Seriously dull., 2 Jun 2009
A team of archaeologists gather on a site in Greenland to dig a `lost' Viking settlement. During the course of their work they are plagued by an uneasy feeling of being `haunted' by the events that led to the site's original destruction. At the same time, their communication with the outside world is interrupted with talk of an epidemic sweeping the world.
I tried to like this book. I wanted to like this book. I have a passing acquaintance with archaeology, having worked in museums and on dig sites; and I have always thought a dig is a good setting for a novel. Very few that I have read in the past have captured the reality or the spirit, so I was hoping this book would succeed. I am also very fond of novels that explore social breakdown and how communities cope as society collapses around them. I thought this would be the ideal book for me. The epidemic angle makes it topical.
The trouble is, this book is bad on so many levels. To begin with it handles its setting poorly. The archaeological side of it could have done with the author watching a few episodes of 'The Time Team'. If the author did much research they have signally failed to transfer it convincingly to the story. Furthermore, it could, for all we get from the book, have been set anywhere. Greenland has a distinctive environment and culture, yet none of that came through to me in the story. Indeed, I was left with the impression that this was just a translocated 'isolated house' story - a staple of pulp horror and detective stories since, well, since Beowulf.
The characters are stilted (as is their dialogue), reading like something from a faux Austen novel written by somebody who has only ever seen Austen on the television. They talk like they are reading a script for the first time with no prior knowledge of story, place, or even their own character. The switching of viewpoints was not well handled and is a terribly dull way to tell a story. Had it simple been presented as the journals of a group of people who didn't survive from which we piece together their last days it would have been infinitely more interesting. Instead, it all peters out as if the author was not able to keep all the plates spinning. At no point was I able to develop any empathy for any of them or, indeed, find any sympathy for their plight. They were so awfully middle class and wrapped up with their own tiny concerns, I found myself wishing for some mad Viking ghost to rampage through the camp with a bloody axe.
'Cold Earth' is touted by the publisher as a "highly sophisticated novel of ideas". Too many ideas. None of them sophisticated (unless middle class academic preoccupations count as sophisticated). Either theme (isolated group or pandemic) would have been sufficient for a novel of ideas. Even together in the hands of a skilled writer it could have worked. Instead it fails. And because the bar for this kind of story has already been set so high (Ballard and Camus are two names that spring to mind) it is unwise to attempt such an approach unless you have the skills to match that. Moss may be a great academic; she is not a good fiction writer.
In the end, what we have is an amateurish piece of writing that has an over abundance of false sentimentality and no real core of emotion. There is no feeling of urgency and for me, little to make me read to the end other than the hope it got better. It didn't. The book doesn't work as an intellectual exercise (there are no startling insights into the human condition), it doesn't work as a thriller (despite the potential), and it doesn't work as speculative fiction (indeed, the only speculation I made was how the book made it to publication, although given the information in the Acknowledgements, it is possible to make an educated guess). It is not out and out dire. I have read worse. But it is not a book I could honestly recommend to anyone.
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