Book Comments #1

I promised some book reviews of what I read while away.

First of all a book I read sometime ago but which other family members read in France – The Curious Incident book. Read it yet?

It’s a good read...definetely on a par with Life of Pi but that was so annoying...

So far three of our family have read it – me and Theresa and our son Sam who is 9. Sam thought it was very strange and couldn’t get his head round it. When he did get it, he loved it and finished it in no time. Theresa and I enjoyed it…but I am not sure it is something I will go back to – nor seek out the author’s other works - I mean he is a children's author after all!

For me, it still bears some hallmarks of voyeurism. I wonder whether the guy’s strangeness is a bit too Freakshow-like – does the book ridicule him for not wanting to eat yellow and brown food or food that touches other food? Does it sneer at him for groaning or for asking too many questions. Are you supposed to pity him at the end, or be sick of him (like his mum?), or what? Clearly, disability means pressures both for the individual and carers. But I still feel a bit uneasy at whether I actually met the real person here…

Where is God in it? Of course, the hero (see, I can’t even remember his name!) thinks that heaven cannot exist and so nor can God. His special issues mean that he cannot be convinced of the existence of something that is rationally unsound – in his construction of rationality. I actually found the book to be quite a godless place. As I think back about it there was no sense of God’s presence, of beauty, of love. Everything seems so harsh and edgy – it’s like a modernist/cubist building. Part of that is the world which the author is trying to project – someone with this worldview is angular and harsh and black and white.

But does it have to be so? Think of some of Doug Coupland’s books – like Microserfs
or Girlfriend in a Coma – dealing with issues which are miles away from theology but still there is such an overwhelming presence of God.

If you haven’t read Girlfriend in a Coma you must – but not alone!!!

More to come…including the Da Vinci Code which I am trudging my way through....first impressions - a dumbed down Foucault's Pendulum?

Pete

Comments

[lou]

Hi,

I liked the curious incident, I thought I'd easily tire of it's very flat style "I did this and then I did that ..." but I didn't. I found myself not pitying the hero but actually getting annoyed with the other characters when they couldn't understand him or ran out of patience with him.

As for his not liking yellow or brown and all that, well I have a few things I don't like for no rational reason - chinks in curtains being one, my husband doesn't like the feel of metal. So I feel I have no room for sneering at someone else's oddities.

There was no sense of God in the book, that's right, but I think there was a great sense of beauty in the order of mathematics. I think that someone who couldn't see the very obvious love of his own father for him would really struggle with understanding a God of love. Someone who clung so strictly to rationality would have a hard time accepting the unexplainable. However, I think there would be a way to introduce God to him - as someone who gives order to chaos, a more reliable superstition than counting red cars every day.

That's a bit of a futile excercise though, I can't introduce God to a fictional character!

[Yaz]

come on Pete! God is EVERYWHERE in that book. It is a while since i read it but i went away with a profound sense of God in the detail, the tiny, the things that pass us by... not to mention God in the complicated and God in the messy... The beauty is in him, Christopher, it is in his way of seeing the world.
I also have to say U shouldn't just write someone off coz they're only a children's author. There's loads of books out there at the moment that go beyond children's fiction and yet remain children's fiction at the same time. Just read 'Wolf Brother' new out and it was fantastic.
Tek care, nice to hear from you after your summer break!!
Yaz