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abandoned books #3 and #4
May. 13th, 2008 04:59 pmIt had been not since shortly after the beginning of the year that I'd last abandoned a book midway, and I was beginning to think I was being incredibly lucky and/or judicious in my selection of reading material, when along came two in a row. (Well, almost in a row. There was another book in between. I'm getting a bit behind in my reports.)
In the buildup to my Major Groinshredding Event (see http://realthog.livejournal.com/43209.html for the full heroic details), I decided it might be an idea to turn away briefly from my policy of reading only Yer Quality in order to devour a bit of jolly garbage that would . . . no, "take me out of myself" is definitely not the term I want to use in this context. What I was after, obviously, was something page-turning in which I could lose myself and thereby banish thoughts of Bright Shiny Sharp Things.
So I plucked off the shelf Sallie Bissell's 2001 thriller In the Forest of Harm, which used the term "psychological terror" in the second line of the blurb so sounded promising. "You think you know what psychological terror is?" I could imagine myself jeering. "Just you wait until you have an angiogram scheduled for next Tuesday!"
Well, I got to page 71. Feisty Assistant DA Mary Crow has managed to secure the conviction of a rich fratboy type even though she's not entirely convinced he dunnit. So off she goes with her two personality-overdosed girlfriends for a few days' hiking through remote stretches of the Nantahala National Forest, on the Tennessee/North Carolina border. What she doesn't take into account is that (a) Fratboy's vengeful brother might follow her and (b) she and her strapping companions might attract the attention of the psychopath who years ago murdered her mother and has been living as a wild man in the forest ever since. And you thought the only hazards would be bears, spiders and Boy Scouts?
I wasn't very far into the book before I realized I'd been here many, many times before. That might not have been too bad a thing, under the circumstances, but unfortunately the writing was pretty damn' clunky, so I could never immerse myself properly in the story because The Editor Within was stopping every few lines for a quick wince. Plus, all the characters I was supposed to like seemed fairly ghastly to me (e.g., she's not entirely certain of the guy's guilt so she goes for the conviction anyway?). I stuck it out as long as I could, then realized the book really wasn't serving its purpose. At the wall it was duly thrown.
The trouble with abandoning texts partway through is, of course, that for all you know things might really have started looking up if only you'd persevered a few paragraphs longer. This may very well be the case with In the Forest of Harm. At the moment, though, I feel little temptation to go back and find out.
I then picked up Stephen White's very good 2002 thriller Warning Signs, on which I'll report in due course.
By a glorious piece of lousy timing, I finished White's book the night before my trip to the abattoir -- actually, it's the book's fault that this was so, not mine. Reckoning that I'd be stuck on a gurney all day long doing dartboard imitations, I chose to take with me a rather more hifalutin novel, one I'd been looking forward to for quite some time: Maya Rasker's Unknown Destination (2000; translated very nicely from the Dutch by Barbara Fasting 2002). A year ago Gideon's wife, Raya Mira, went out in the rain to get a packet of cigarettes from the pub on the corner and never came back. Now he has steeled himself to open the suitcase in which she kept her personal treasures. Going through these, he makes a second exploratory voyage in quest of the enigmatic individual who was his wife . . .
I had far less time for reading than I thought I might at the hospital, so in the event it was after we'd got home that I got properly stuck into Unknown Destination . . . except that I didn't. I kept at it for the next couple of days, but by page 95 I still didn't feel as if the book had actually started. It was a curious sensation: I seemed to be pushing through swirling, misty clouds of prose that were in themselves fairly appealing; however, unable to see my feet because of these, I hadn't the slightest idea where I'd managed to get myself to, or even if I'd gotten anywhere at all. I probably would have enjoyed this disorientation had I been reading a short or even a long story, but over the full stretch of a novel it eventually proved just plain tiresome. A great shame. I had really, really, really wanted to like this book, which received a 2001 Golden Dog-Ear Award and was nominated for a couple of others.
In this instance I might one day come back for a second try. On the other hand, my disappointment in it has been so keen that I may never be able to bring myself to look at the book again without remembering how let down I felt the first time, so . . .
