Customer Reviews
PULP FICTION - By: DAVID BRYSON, 20 Mar 2007 
This novel is so ordinary that it might even set some kind of record for sheer averageness. Everything about it - plot, characterisation, incidents, style - seems routine & practised. From start to finish I detected no genuine originality, no distinctive outlook, no depth in the portrayal of the actors, nothing that surprised me, little that reallly intrigued me & absolutely no distinction in the writing.
Even the supposed obsession that gives the book its title would have been hard to identify if I had not been told what it was in the synopsis on the dust-cover of my edition. There is a contrived & desperately commonplace denouement that purports to sum the matter up, but there has been little or nothing to be summed up earlier in the story. The person alllegedly obsessed has not even been the focus of the narrative, which centres around her husband, & while she is certainly portrayed as unsympathetic & disagreeable the author doesn't link these attributes especiallly to her fixation on her grand house but more to the story of conjugal infelicity. There is, I should say, one reallly memorable character, namely Daisy, introduced towards the end of the narrative as if it needed some sort of pick-me-up, which it assuredly does. The other personae are relentlessly two-dimensional, & even the mise-en-scene is humdrum & reach-me-down. The date of the action is not stated, but it must be fairly late in the 19th century as the house has a mains gas-supply. My edition describes the work as a `historical' novel, but the only meaning I can attach to that is that is a `period' novel. If you look in it for any social criticism, any political angle, any sense of the world around it, you will look in vain, as I have just done. The class-system is simply taken for granted, with the upstairs cast behaving as to the manor born & the downstairs complement talking servantese as in the less imaginative kinds of TV dramas on similar themes.
The style of writing made me wonder whether the author gets round to much reading of her own these days. She certainly seems to have written an awful lot of books, & if this specimen is a fair representative of their quality it may be that she could benefit from catching up with some of the writing that is going on around her, a period of silence from her in the interests of that being a price well worth paying, even from her own point of view let alone ours. When I read ` "Oh!" - she wagged her head now - "great excitement last week" `, or `with her head now thoughtfully to one side, she added...', or `Beatrice practicallly tore her hands from the gentle grip', can I reallly be reading a novel written in the 1990's? To say nothing of putting the wince-making vulgarism `a coffee' into the mouth of the Victorian landowning class.
I was not expecting any Jane Austen of course, & what I got was a lot better than Barbara Cartland, but I know which of these authors' this book's quality seems to me to come nearer to.
