Review: OK for free, but not tempted to invest
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 08 14, 2012
I'm guessing this is a "loss leader", intended to tempt the reader into purchasing other books from this author. Unfortunately, I was not remotely tempted.The overall premise is good: this is set in the village of Eyam, famous for quarantining itself when plague arrived in the village in an attempt to halt the spread of the disease to neighbouring populations. There are characters drawn from true life, a love story, and much tragedy as one might expect.However, the story really didn't take flight for me. It was pedestrian, even plodding at times, there were no real surprises and little suspense.In addition, the writing was clunky. Several times the author uses words in a context which makes me wonder if he knows what they actually mean. There is a proliferations of said bookisms, and (I assume in an attempt to make the language sound "olde worlde") the dialogue is frequently painfully stilted. Above all, the point of view jumps between characters with no attempt at clarity or cohesion. Sometimes I wasn't sure whose head I was in. If it was an attempt at an omniscient style of narration, it was badly done.Lastly, there were a number of jarring anachronisms. Several times characters used phrases or words that sounded distinctly out of place, and the style on the whole felt like the author was trying to create a period feel, but didn't really know how to do it. The worst anachronism was the description of a near-dead plague victim:"The ends of his nose and fingers had begun to blacken from gangrene, indicating that the bacterium concentration in Vicars' bloodstream was so high that his system has turned septic."This sentence comes at the end of a paragraph which seems very much to be from the rector, Mompesson's, point of view. There's even a little "train of thought" moment where the rector decides the plague victim is no longer Vicars, but a monster... yet if we're in Mompesson's head, he's a fortune teller, as bacteria were not even observed till a decade after the story is set; their role in disease would not be understood, confirmed, and universally accepted for centuries. If there was a distinction between an authorial voice and the "point of view" moments inside the characters' heads, that wouldn't be an issue, but the description of Vicars as the monster the rector sees flows directly into scientific knowledge that is utterly out of place.Overall then: for a free read, it's OK. It does have a story, it's no so badly written as to be painful and isn't chock full of grammatical errors. I have, in all honesty, read much worse! However, I would not buy another book by this author, and I'm deleting this novella from my archive as I can't see any reason I'd want to read it again.