Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
21 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A great middle, 9 Aug 2009
A great middle, but where's the beginning and the end?
How To Paint A Dead Man pitches straight in to the story - no introductions - and this means that any significance in the first chapters is rather lost in the confusion. I'm told this is a style called "in medias res" and is often a sign of an artist at work. And in case we missed it, we get it four times over - as the novel comprises four stories, chopped up and we get a chapter of each in turn, before we return to the first. This, too, isn't quite spelt out adding to the air of confusion. In fact, it later becomes apparent that each of the four stories has its own title, and this is the heading at the start of the chapter, but it takes a while to twig onto that.
We then have four separate narrative strands, each one quite self-consciously beautiful, and each with theme of art. Writers seem to like writing about art - perhaps it gives them licence to paint with words. Whilst that can irritate, in this case some of the narratives really came into sharp and atmospheric focus at times. At its best, the narrative was gripping with clear, strong characterization and compelling story lines. We felt Peter's pain as he struggled to free himself from the wet, cold rocks. We rooted for Annette's courage in facing her blindness and the vulnerability that brought. At other times the focus seemed to drift and one narrative - The Mirror Crisis - never seemed to arrive at all.
Although the narratives had characters in common (the focus of one might be mentioned in another) the stories were really separate, like four novellas interleafed. Perhaps this was necessary to add relief to the intensity of the narrative, perhaps it was useful in masking the fact that none of the narratives was strong enough to stand on its own. Who can say? The overall effect, though, was to make the novel appear a little bit deeper than it really was.
Not content with the "in medias res" openings, Sarah Hall has opted for studied ambiguity in the ending. Four times over. That felt just a bit tacky - as a gimmick, ambiguity can work once in a while. But yo use it four times in the space of twenty or so pages just makes it look as though Sarah Hall didn't know how to write an ending. The effect then, is one of the Trail Pieces of which Seamus Heaney wrote. Beautifully crafted, intricate works with no purpose - not part of a bigger thing. Sure there are themes, particularly death, loss, infirmity, disability. There is just a lack of something to bring it all together.
|
|
|
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A slow-burning read that will make you think., 2 Aug 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
This is an unashamedly literary novel about art, life, death, and ultimately rebirth, with four separate but linked stories in alternating chapters looking back over about forty years. There's the former hippy enfant-terrible of the art world Peter, who, now part of the establishment, lives happily in Cumbria with his second wife Lydia; There's Susan - Suze - Peter's daughter and twin of drop-out Danny, making a name for herself as a photographer. Then there are two strands set in Italy - the great dying artist Giorgio who only paints still-lifes of bottles; and finally the blind girl Annette whom Giorgio used to teach before she lost her sight. The English and Italian strands are then linked initially by Peter's correspondence with Giorgio. There are many other tiny links that only become apparent as you read on.
The most thought-provoking story of the four though is that of Susan; the other three often appear to be in mere supporting roles, although they do all have their starring moments. Susan is suffering, her twin brother is died in a stupid accident, and normal life for her can't go on without her true other half. Numbed, she can only look life from outside of herself, and indulges in a wanton affair so that she can just feel something. Her story is written in the second person, and this makes it so detached, brutal yet clear. Yet the other three lives are in stasis too. In Italy, Giorgio is waiting to die and Annette is growing up blind and cushioned from normal life by her overbearing mother. Peter meanwhile is physically trapped - having fallen while out walking the fells trapping his leg. All are forced to look back upon the past as they wait for something to happen.
It took a couple of chapters of each of the stories to get into this novel. By the end though, you really cared about the characters, particularly Peter and Susan. Their stories resonate with an English reality in a way that is hard to compare with the comparative village idyll of the Italian strands. This is a slow-burning and challenging read that ends up forcing you to you think and meditate on what true artists think as well as the value of a life lived.
|
|
|
7 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Odd, fragmented and dark, 8 Jun 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
This is an unusual book. Four individual stories told chapter by chapter, each chapter - not each story - following from the next. For forty pages, I thought it was unbearably pretentious but then the story within the stories began to unfold - you begin to see the tenuous threads that connect one to another. These threads are very slight, sometimes just a single word or sentence within the whole story that suddenly clues you in to why X connects to Y and informs and influences Z.
The style is very literate, not often naturalistic but it gains a rhythm over time and becomes oddly compelling and, for such a `wordy' work, quite a page turner. It's pretty dark, too. None of the stories are cheerful, only one has even a modicum of light at the end of the tunnel and even that comes with a painful sting.
Don't be tempted - as I was at first, when I admit I was being bored rigid - to read the stories as wholes, skipping the intervening tales. To do this is to miss out the subtle links that bind the whole and make this rather grim book so readable
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Ed O'Loughlin
by James Scudamore
by Adam Foulds
by Samantha Harvey
by Simon Mawer
