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Book 41 - D.M Thomas "Ararat"
Jul. 13th, 2012 06:53 amD.M Thomas "Ararat" (Abacus)
A frustrating book which i picked up on one of my charity shop excursions.
It was once described as an eloquent tale by one reviewer, and alas, that the "eloquent tale" itself contains many eloquent tales. Instead of a simple frame (as in Ethan Frome) or even a slightly more complicated one (as in Wuthering Heights), D.M. Thomas adds frame within frame within frame. The storyteller tells a story about a storyteller telling a story about a storyteller telling a story about a storyteller telling a story....until the reader loses count of the layers.
While this is certainly a creative structure for a novel, it doesn't quite work here. As the stories progress, they become fragments of stories. While this could be symbolic or otherwise purposeful, it reads more like several ideas for several novels that never really took off, all of them meandering for a bit and then trailing off, held together only by this final novel's structure.
Thomas is a fabulous writer. His prose and poetry in Ararat are as good as ever in some patches of the book, but the work is inconsistent overall, especially as compared to his other work. If you want a novel that truly meets the description of a "brilliant unfurling of poetry and erotica," seek out Thomas' The White Hotel. In that earlier novel, he was at least as imaginative in his structure, but everything came together as one consistently excellent whole. Unfortunately, it may be his near total success in that novel which makes this later work pale in comparison.
Disappointing.
A frustrating book which i picked up on one of my charity shop excursions.
It was once described as an eloquent tale by one reviewer, and alas, that the "eloquent tale" itself contains many eloquent tales. Instead of a simple frame (as in Ethan Frome) or even a slightly more complicated one (as in Wuthering Heights), D.M. Thomas adds frame within frame within frame. The storyteller tells a story about a storyteller telling a story about a storyteller telling a story about a storyteller telling a story....until the reader loses count of the layers.
While this is certainly a creative structure for a novel, it doesn't quite work here. As the stories progress, they become fragments of stories. While this could be symbolic or otherwise purposeful, it reads more like several ideas for several novels that never really took off, all of them meandering for a bit and then trailing off, held together only by this final novel's structure.
Thomas is a fabulous writer. His prose and poetry in Ararat are as good as ever in some patches of the book, but the work is inconsistent overall, especially as compared to his other work. If you want a novel that truly meets the description of a "brilliant unfurling of poetry and erotica," seek out Thomas' The White Hotel. In that earlier novel, he was at least as imaginative in his structure, but everything came together as one consistently excellent whole. Unfortunately, it may be his near total success in that novel which makes this later work pale in comparison.
Disappointing.
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