Author Archives: Jaclyn

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About Jaclyn

Reader, writer, bookaholic for life!

Review | A God in Ruins, Kate Atkinson

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GodinRuinsI had mixed feelings about Atkinson’s earlier novel Life After Life. I thought that concept behind the book — the ability to live one’s life over and over again until you get it right — was more compelling than the book itself. So when I received an advance reading copy of the companion novel A God in Ruins, I wasn’t quite that hyped up about it, and while I was going to give it a shot, I was at most cautiously optimistic.

A God in Ruins is about Teddy, the younger brother of Ursula, who in turn was the protagonist in Life After Life. Unlike Ursula, Teddy gets only one life to live, and we follow his journey from being a mischievous little boy to fighting in World War II as an RAF pilot, and finally to adjusting to life after the war.

I thought A God in Ruins was a much stronger book, though I also think that having it parallel Life After Life to some degree added to its strength. The poignancy of having only one life to live, set against the backdrop of World War II, is particularly heightened by our knowledge that having the chance to live one’s life over and over again isn’t quite tragedy-free either. The scenes about the war may be the most dramatic, but it’s Teddy’s life after the war that holds most resonance — his struggle to cope with going back to ordinary life and his strained relationship with his daughter.

There were some points where I felt bored reading the book, but other moments where scenes hold major emotional impact. I love the Adventures of Augustus stories about a little boy modelled after Teddy. The innocence and mischief in these tales are particularly resonant when contrasted with the hardness he needed to acquire for the war.

Despite the shifts back and forth in time, the story is fairly linear, with the exception of the final couple of chapters in the end. These chapters hearken to the mysticism of Life After Life, but in this case, I found they packed an emotional wallop for the reader. With these final few pages, Atkinson casts the rest of the novel in a new light, and heightens so much more the reality of war, of wasted potential, lives cut too short, and other lives that can feel too long.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | At the Water’s Edge, Sara Gruen

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WatersEdgeWhen a trio of privileged young socialites set off to find the Loch Ness monster in a war-torn zone, they instead discover the monsters hidden in their midst in Sara Gruen’s At the Water’s Edge. The Second World War is on, and for Ellis Hyde, proving the Loch Ness monster’s existence is a way to validate his father’s sighting years ago, defend his family’s honour, and protect himself from accusations of cowardice for avoiding the draft due to his colour-blindness. His wife Maddie and their best friend Hank reluctantly come along for the ride, leaving behind the safety of their estates for the centre of a battlefield.

I love the symbolism in this novel — their quest for the Loch Ness monster is framed by the very real spectre of Hitler destroying the world in his campaign of hate. The monster symbology becomes personal as well, as Maddie begins to see a different side of Ellis in his obsession with his quest.

The story is very much about Maddie and her growth as a character. While Ellis and Hank go off daily to search for the monster, Maddie is left alone in their temporary home, and has to deal with the reality of the villagers’ lives around her. I love how she develops from someone who is completely oblivious to her privilege to a strong, self-sufficient young woman. Their quest is immediately a source of scorn, as the people around them are too busy trying to survive various air raids and deal with the loss of their loved ones to even think of wasting time on chasing an imaginary creature. Of the three socialites, Maddie is the most sensitive to these responses and immediately feels embarrassed, though she doesn’t quite understand the full extent of their insensitivity until she gets to know the villagers a bit better.

In contrast, Ellis and Hank remain fixated on the monster, and barely make an effort to adapt to the circumstances. This is fascinating from a symbolic perspective, with the monster motif made personal, but it’s also a bit of a shame as their characters — Ellis in particular — fairly quickly devolves into a caricature of himself. There is little depth to his character, and virtually no development.

A revelation near the end had the potential to add texture to Ellis’ character, possibly even cast a sympathetic light on his motives. But it was framed with such a disturbing confession that it mostly seemed as just another bit of proof of monstrousness, which was such a shame.

That being said, I love what Gruen has done with Maddie’s character. It’s not easy to step out of one’s comfort zone — and then to be shunted aside for some whimsical adventure — but it was fantastic seeing the character rise to the occasion, and seeing her come to terms with the reality beyond the world she’s always known.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood

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atwoodIn a dystopian world, humans are offered a chance at escape: join a social experiment and live in a self-contained community where you alternate months between a suburban lifestyle and a prison. The goal for the experiment is a solution to overcrowding in prisons, as one character terms it, timeshare taken to the extreme.

For couple Stan and Charmaine, it beats the hell out of their current existence sleeping in their car and fighting off hoodlums every night. Stan is somewhat suspicious, but the lure of clean towels and a fresh bed proves too much temptation, and they both apply.

The Heart Goes Last is an Atwood novel, and as anyone familiar with the Oryx and Crake trilogy or The Handmaid’s Tale can attest, ay time a society is presented as utopian, you can pretty much guarantee that it’s not. In this case, the corporation that runs the experiment has its eye on profits — familiar Atwood tropes like headless chickens bred for meat make an appearance, and the question of what happens to residents after they pass away raises a chill, given the community’s devotion to waste reduction.

The title refers to the process of dying, the last vestige of humanity right before the moment of death. And as the story progresses, the title takes on much more resonance, and the struggle to hold on to one’s humanity becomes ever more problematized.

The novel begins as with a fairly slick sci-fi tone — we have the seemingly perfect world, the heightened technology and a philosophy taken to the extreme. Throughout, we get hints that the world isn’t quite so perfect — e.g. the chilling reality of Charmaine’s job, prisoners having sex with chickens — but the core conflict is fairly typical sci-fi. It begins with Charmaine having a secret affair with the man who lives in their house while she and Stan are in prison, and launches off into Stan being utterly enmeshed in the reality behind the system’s shiny veneer.

My main concern with this novel is that Atwood appears to squish so many of her ideas in, yet their impact rarely goes beyond a brief appearance. One example is the aforementioned headless chickens which were literally a passing reference. Another is the development of sex droids, which played a key role in the plot, but barely dealt with the problematic nature of their development.

Rather, the sex droids seemed a mere stepping stone toward what I found a truly chilling development (I’ll avoid spoilers here) — and again, this further development did play a part in the plot, but Atwood barely grazes the surface of how problematic this is. There is a great snippet of a conversation where one character challenges the idea that “nobody is exploited,” and another corrects him, “I said nobody feels exploited. Different thing.” There’s so much to unpack within that statement, vis a vis some of the things happening within this world, but then it’s barely touched upon till the very end. Unlike, for example, The Handmaid’s Tale, where there are a couple of key driving forces behind the plot, the story in The Heart Goes Last seems to want to go off into multiple directions, without quite settling on one.

The most powerful section of the book for me comes at the very end. Without giving too much away, it involves a procedure and the happiness of a couple of characters. The final pages in particular call into question what happiness entails, and what love really means. It brings up contemporary notions of romantic love, and contrasts it with the sedateness of a long-term relationship, and calls into question under what circumstances we can find happiness within both. These themes were discussed in various ways throughout the novel, but I felt a lot of it got lost underneath the discussions around the prison system and sex droids. There were certainly moments of potency (a revelation about the knitted blue teddy bears is particularly discomfiting), but not quite enough cohesion among them all.

Still, the book made me think, and the ending in particular was problematic in a good way and made me long for more. It’s not my favourite Atwood, but it’s a highly readable tale with Atwood’s trademark wit and quite a few tidbits for thought.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.