peteg's blog - noise - books - 2020 11 07 CeridwenDovey InTheGardenOfTheFugitives

Ceridwen Dovey: In the Garden of the Fugitives.

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Kindle. The problem with reading on the Kindle is that it's too expensive to throw across the room every time a book gets too irritating. The legions of local reviews fawn over Ms Dovey's prose, but too often I see clanging repetition, contradictions within the same paragraph, and characters celebrating the awesomeness of other characters' observations and unsupported assertions, shading into authorial self praise. Much could be fixed with clearer thinking about what she's trying to say, and pondering if it's, you know, actually worth saying; the hiding behind unreliable narrators does not add layers via self perception, it just needlessly musses up the message. The Remains of the Day this is not.

Structurally this thing is supposed to be an exchange of emails. This almost immediately proves unsustainable and is replaced with the old reliable two-track. The voices, initially somewhat distinct, are entirely flattened, including the dialogue within the dual but not duelling monologues. All I concluded is that you too can go to Harvard (or New York University as the case may be) and come away with an unfurnished mind.

I picked this up because I remember enjoying her inventiveness in Only the Animals. There's none of that here, or any humour. The excess of researched, touristic and psychoanalytic detail is trying, reminding me of that fad from a few years back (Rushdie, Ghosh, ...) that requires a home for every factoid the author encounters. Overall it looks like we're watching Ms Dovey do her South African white guilt therapeutic exercises in public. A cursory scan of the reviews suggests this is easy to see but difficult to engage with.