Almost Didn’t Finish Reading: The Separation by Dinah Jefferies (FP: 2014)
Malaya, 1955. On returning home after visiting a sick friend, Lydia Cartwright finds her house empty and her husband and children nowhere to be seen. Investigating at the High Commission she is informed that her husband has been assigned to an emergency post ‘in country’. Determined to meet up with her family again Lydia embarks on the perilous journey inland through the very heart of the local Communist insurgency known simply as ‘The Emergency’. But bad news awaits her. On reaching the outpost she finds that the government building has been burnt to the ground by terrorists and that everyone, including her family, died in the fire. Distraught she falls back on the only person she can trust, Jack Harding - plantation owner and former lover. Meanwhile, in England her Husband and two girls are starting a new life. The girls have been told that their mother has abandoned them, but the eldest girl, Emma, refuses to believe it and begins asking questions much to her father’s growing irritation.
OK, firstly this wasn’t really what I was expecting to read. I guess I should have read the blurb a bit more closely but still….. My other excuse for almost not finishing this – I essentially gritted my teeth through the last 80 pages or so – was that I was ill throughout the second half of the book. Anyway….. Although this was quite well written, especially for a first book, I did have huge problems with it – or more specifically with the main character Lydia. I’m not sure if all mid 50’s women were like this but I honestly wanted to slap her more than once. I mean, she was just so trusting of the authorities. Told that her family was dead – without a shred of physical evidence to support it – she simply accepted the fact and tried to move on. Even when presented with evidence that they were alive, or at least statements that contradicted the official position she hesitated and suddenly became sceptical. When given the opportunity to ask leading questions she either failed to do so – being seemingly more interested in past or present emotional attachments of the other characters – or asked a single question and meekly accepted the answer she was given much to my growing frustration with her (I honestly lost my cool with her on one occasion and almost through the book down in disgust). The plot, such that it was, was overly convoluted (a common fault with first novels) and containing sub-plots that neither moved the story forward nor explained anything about the characters themselves. The rejected lesbian kiss and the completely unnecessary child molestation sub-plots particularly annoyed me. Overall I only finished this book because not to do so would have been a huge waste of time. I most certainly didn’t enjoy it and can’t recommend it to anyone else.
5 comments:
Sorry about your disappointment with this book, but I found a silver lining, you just gave me good pointers for my book. "The plot, such that it was, was overly convoluted (a common fault with first novels) and containing sub-plots that neither moved the story forward nor explained anything about the characters themselves." I'm in a "filling in" stage on my book, making sure the plot moves along nicely, making sure I don't have loose threads in the plot, fleshing out the characters, and adding needed details. I've realized I need more charcter development on a couple characters for later parts of the story to make sense. This has been an interesting experience, learning how to craft a basic story line, then making it better in the re-writes.
Cool. I hope that it all works out for you.
Well, I'm realistic that it is not going to be a great story. It is a first novel after all, it will have rough patches and weaknesses. I don't want it to, of course, so I'm doing my best to fix errors as I see them, but there's only so much a novice will catch. This is more about whether I can write a whole book. Once I've mastered, that I am capable of the discipline to do such a thing, then I will progress to, okay, now, write a good book. Baby steps.
I like your attitude. As you say - realistic. Are you checking out any of the 'how to' books on novel writing? There's quite a few by famous (and good) authors giving advice on all kinds of things from plotting to character development and much else besides.....
Right now I'm huddled down in my own brain with the story, writing what comes to me and editing repeatedly. I discovered when I mentioned one tidbit of the plot to M and her criticism was overly harsh, that if I listened to what was outside of me before I finished it, I wouldn't finish it. In my head, the most important thing is that I write the whole book. M apologized the next day. She recognized she was being a Monday morning quarterback and that since she'd never written anything of this size, that it was too critical when she hadn't even read the story. Sorry to be so vague, but this is where I am in the process. It's my baby. I'm protecting it and helping it grow. Once that's complete, and I'm not so fearful that I won't finish what I start, then I can begin the process of re-forming it. Does any of that make sense? It's like the first man to climb Mt. Everest. If he listened to all the people who said it couldn't be done, or how hard and dangerous it would be, or how they would do it, maybe he never would have climbed it. I feel like this book is my mountain. I'm almost to the top, then I can look back down and see what I would do differently, and fix it. :-)
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