This novel is subtitled “A City in Ten Chapters” and we want
to know the secret of this city, we spend 278 pages (in my edition) wandering
around lost in this city, wondering about ourselves will we be gratified, will
the novel answer all the questions it has raised, if only for my own
gratification.
The city is a mystery when you
notice it’s full of sunken side streets falling away from you beside river and
canal, by yellow and pink brick terraces, in September for instance under
castles of foliage, in deep light. Someone approaches and you’re sure you
recognise him, you’ve met just once, and not long ago, but he vanishes away
down one of those streets and you miss him. You feel you owe an apology. And it
only gets deeper, the riddle of it, as years go by and the special creatures
stay exactly the same, just as they were when Stephen went with them. The
modulation of names and faces makes no difference at all.
The cover of my novel has a review snippet from Tash Aw “A
strange remarkable work”, well I concur, this novel is strange, very strange.
More like ten short stories all on the same theme of the city, with different
voices, different tenses, different eras, first person, and third person,
missing characters, choruses and probably more. We have tales that ring of Sam
Spade, ones that are lifted straight from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (with a
consulting detective and his sidekick – the sidekick narrating that chapter),
others that are gothic and others that are drenched in heartache but also
horror.
As you know I don’t like to put spoilers in my reviews but
in this case I could probably point out the whole novel and it wouldn’t spoil
it in any way as I must admit (it is my failing here) I just didn’t get it.
Initially I thought it was being structured as a growing metropolis may be
having an architectural theme, or slowly constructing a whole, later I thought
it was all going to lead to a common theme as Colum McCann did brilliantly in “Let
The Great World Spin”, even later still I thought it was probably a mixture of
unconnected tales as would happen in a city, where your paths may never cross
another individual. I still don’t know what this was, it is set in the past
(maybe), the future (probably), the present (unlikely) and the disparate
sections have minimal linking themes (maybe the “don’t go out at night” theme
was common). We even have a “memory city” within the city:
And does our discipline not have
a special affinity with the ancient practice of the memory house, for where
does the detective live, if not in a memory
city, a city that is less a physical place than a world of codes and
symbols? Does she not, in her mind, walk the street at all times, in search of
the meanings concealed there?
Yes this is a novel of codes and symbols, you could go back
and reread it numerous times to search for the meanings concealed there, you
could probably work out the literary references each chapter represents and
then come to some conclusive whole. Personally I enjoyed a lot of the quotes,
the language and the concept, pity is it didn’t reach the heights I thought were
there, hate to say it but this is no David Mitchell, nor did it leave me with a
sense of wanting more.
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