Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stick with it...your patience will be rewarded!, 25 Mar 2007
Yes, it is long, yes it could've been shorter, considerably shorter, and yes the fact that the author clearly didn't know where the story was going is obvious. But, my goodness, what a book?!
If anything, the perambulatory nature of the plot is one of this books delights. Some books lose you because the plot unravels in your hand like paper in the rain. This plot slowly reveals itself. It teases you. It leaves you aching for more.
And I haven't mentioned the varied and colourful characters, or the city and it's environs. The environment itself is reminiscent of Hardy (in terms of the delight the author takes in laying the streets, fields and buildings before the reader), while the characters are beautifully conveyed and reminiscent of Dickens.
There is also something of Tolkein in the structure of the 'volumes' or chapters. While you see events unfold around one of the key characters you are desperate to know what is happening to the others. This is one of the reasons behind the "Just one more page" factor that this book has in spades.
This leads me to the timelessness of the book. Time seems to stand still on the page and around you in 'real world'. It should come with a health wanring: "Reading this book on a train could result in many missed stops!"
I am not surprised by the love it/hate it reviews so far. This book was never going to be scoring 2 or 3 stars. It takes risks, challenges literary norms and breaks all the acceptable rules. I hated it at first but was reassured that it would pay to keep going. Within five chapters I was in a sort of daze, finding myself drifting off during meetings to the streets and hotels of this imaginary world, wondering what was happening to my beloved characters. Rarely does a book stick with you as much as this one.
This book is not just a collection of pages with a very pretty face (and my, what a pretty face it is, too). This is book with many, many hidden depths. Dive in. Explore. Enjoy.
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30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lengthy but unusual..., 14 Mar 2007
After spending all the life on a Caribbean island, 25 year-old heiress Celeste Temple moves to Victorian London, determined to find a husband. She meets Roger Bascombe who is handsome and polite and exactly what Miss Temple is looking for, so she doesn't look any further and settles on him. Three months after, she is baffled when she receives a letter from him, breaking off their engagement. More angry than heart-broken, she decides to follow him to see if there is another woman. Following him, Miss Temple gets on a train which takes her to a mansion outside London. What she discovers there is stranger and more shocking than she could ever have imagined. Making her escape from the mansion, Miss Temple is chased by two men and ends up killing one. On her way back to London on the train, she meets Cardinal Chang. Chang is an assassin, hired to kill a man at the mansion. When he arrives at the mansion, Chang finds the man dead. At the hotel where she is lodging, Miss Temple meets Dr. Abelard Svenson, another man on a mission. He has been sent to England with the prince of a foreign country to take care of him (or rather, make sure he doesn't let his vices get the better of him). Miss Temple, Chang and Dr. Svenson each have a stake in discovering the secret of the mansion and the mysterious glass books and they decide they must pursue it. In the meantime, they are being also being pursued by people who believe they already know the secrets of the mansion.
At 700+ pages, the books is a bit long and may at times stagnates, but it is still riveting and unusual and thoroughly enjoyable. When I say that Celeste's discovery is strange and shocking, I do mean it. It is really not what you expect. Even when things start going downhill at the mansion, you imagine it to be something different (or at least I did). It's worth ploughing through the massive book to find out.
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25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Totally original, 9 Mar 2007
Those reviewers who have slammed this novel based on their reading of one or three chapters really shouldn't be posting reviews here at all. This is a book of almmost 800 pages, and it moves at a fairly leisurely pace. The writing could be better (and could have been improved by professional editing), but the concept is so bizarre, the setting is so surreal, the characters are so odd (yet believable), that you would be missing a marvellous one-off tale by taking those one-star reviews too seriously.
One of the problems is the book's structure. Each of the first 3 chapters tells a lengthy part of the narrative from the point of view of a different character. These 3 characters don't meet up till chapter 4, and even then are soon separated again. But once we see them as a unit and begin to understand the forces they are fighting against, none of that matters. Dahlquist's imagination is disturbing, but I found the world he creates much more engaging than, say, Philip Pullman's second-hand universes. If you start to get sucked into this world--19th century, yet not 19th century, England, yet not England--you will start to find it hard to put down. You crave to know the truth behind the narrative. The prose style, though it needs work, is, on the whole, easy to follow. It has little elegance and quite a few errors ('off of' repeatedly, for example), but that doesn't get in the way of the narrative as it does in, say, Kate Mosse's very clumsily written bestseller Labyrinth. This story leaves you with a sense of strangeness that few others achieve. Read it for that alone.
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by G.W. Dahlquist
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