Review: Downright brilliant
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 21, 2013
In my opinion, S.L. Venables has vaulted over the threshold between fiction and a literary masterpiece with this one.His plot is complex, with a large cast of characters living in different time periods, and scattered across the globe from the Ukrainian port of Odessa to South Africa, Australia and Wales. In the beginning you'll no doubt be wondering (as I did) how these diverse personalities are connected. To find out, you'll just have to follow the Pied Piper until you reach the middle of the book where the pieces of this rich mosaic begin to fit together.Ironbark is so full of superb prose I began bookmarking pages so I could go back and read them again just for the enjoyment of seeing the English language taken to the creative zenith. But this book has much more to offer than exceptional language craftsmanship. Venables brings his characters and the environments they inhabit to life with a movie-like vividness that leaves the reader no choice but to become emotionally involved. I found myself crying at the end; crying for a lost life, a lost love; for the characters who suffered at the hands of misfortune (or their own failings) in this powerful story of suffering and survival.I did find the occasional typographical error, but anyone who can write like S.L. Venables can be forgiven a misplaced comma. Ironbark is one of the finest examples of creative writing I've seen in a long time.