Nigel Farndale

This turned into one of those books you (a) want to finish to see how it all works out, at the same time as (b) not want to finish, as it's such a good read.

There's a lot going on. A WWI deserter who finds love with his landlady: Daniel, his great grandson, whose relationship with his family changes forever when he and his partner nearly die in a plane crash: their daughter Martha who falls in a big way for her Muslim school teacher: a throughly evil and devious academic...

...Each of these strands would almost make a book on its own, but Farndale weaves a gripping story out of all this apparently disparate matter. It's loosely bound together by the idea of ... what? Hallucinations? Angels? Well, spiritual presences that have been known to appear in the lives , even of unbelievers, at extreme moments of stress. This isn't a big feature of the book, but it is I think an important one and links all the main characters, who all have a differing faith background, together.

A satisfying read, one which paints real, meaty pictures of the lives lived by all the main protagonists.… (meer)

So I managed to get through this on the second try. The prose is pretty ugly, with lots of descriptions of things that just couldn't happen. For instance, on page one there is an inanimate object that appears to be moving, possibly because of a heat haze. But it's night time, in London, so there's just no way there could be a heat haze. Then on page four there is a character with a German accent who says "zank you" instead of "thank you", but nobody ever says "zank you", since the "th" in thank is voiceless, so the alveolar equivalent is "sank you". You could argue that this is nitpicking, but I don't read looking for these things, they interrupt my flow as I'm reading. If a description is impossible, it adds nothing to the scene and casts doubt on the rest of the description. There is no particular wit or style to the prose, either.

The characters are the best aspect of the book. Most of them are fairly coherent, although somewhat simplified. The dialogue is inconsistent, with some of it flowing quite well and some of it forced.

The plot is entertaining but definitely rather problematic, with an excessively elaborate connection that doesn't actually add much to the tension or the meaning of the events. The queer themes are not dealt with in a particularly interesting or sensitive way. About a hundred pages in I had a peek at the author bio in the front of my paperback copy to check my suspicion that the author is not queer, as there was a deadness to the sections involving queer characters that was in contrast to the more energetic descriptions of straight relationships. Obviously the fact that the author is married to a woman doesn't mean he's not queer, but this is not a queer novel. In fact, this novel serves as a interesting illustration of the difference between "gay" or "homosexual" and queer. Yes, there are gay characters here, but there is nothing radical or challenging about it.

I did enjoy this book a bit, but I skimmed some sections and didn't find any interesting ideas or emotional responses within its pages.… (meer)

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: On its way to the Galapagos Islands, a light aircraft ditches into the sea. As the water floods through the cabin, zoologist Daniel Kennedy faces an impossible choice - should he save himself, or Nancy, the woman he loves?

In a parallel narrative, it is 1917 and Daniel's great grandfather Andrew is preparing to go over the top at Passchendaele. He, too, will have his courage tested, and must live with the moral consequences of his actions.

Back in London, the atheistic Daniel is wrestling with something his 'cold philosophy' cannot explain - something unearthly he thought he saw while swimming for help in the Pacific. But before he can make sense of it, the past must collapse into the present, and both he and Andrew must prove themselves capable of altruism, and deserving of forgiveness.

The Blasphemer is a story about conditional love, cowardice and the possibility of redemption - and what happens to a man of science when forced to question his certainties. It is a novel of rare depth, empathy and ambition that sweeps from the trenches of the First World War to the terrorist-besieged streets of London today: a novel that will speak to the head as well as the heart of any reader.

My Review: Of the three books in here, I like the First World War narrative the best, followed by the London story of academic backbiting and relationship angst, and least of the three the underdeveloped metaphysical events connecting those two. One character says in the course of stitching the stories together that Darwin described angels as creations of Man, which "...have been described as the most beautiful conceit in mortal wit, and I would go along with that."

And that, me hearties, is that.

Daniel, our modern main character, sees his great-grandfather Andrew as he swims to safety. The World War One soldier was a deserter, which is a deeply shocking and shaming thing in the context of the day. Daniel's decision to save himself and not his pill of a baby-mama struck me as most tolerant of him, since I'd've taken the chance to shove her deep into the wreckage so as to be shut of the nightmare carping whinging misery-guts once and for all.

What unites these men across the generations is their cowardly self-preservation, a trait that ultimately lets each create a future for himself and for unknown descendants. It's hard to fault the men. It's hard for them to forgive themselves. It's an interesting counterpoint that Farnsdale sets up: Andrew saves himself from mass insanity and all-but-inevitable senseless death, and Daniel saves his own hide from an accident that will imperil few. Are either of the men "correct" or "justified" in their actions/inactions?

I'm still thinking about them a year after reading the book for the second time. That's a damn good sign.

But I can't go over 3.5 stars of five. The messiness of the story lines is just too egregious for me to go up, and the inventiveness and intriguing premise are too involving for me to go down. It felt to me like the subplot of Daniel's dying father needed to be pruned out, and the characters of Hamsi the teacher and the twirling-mustachioed villain Wetherby were so broadly drawn as to be uninteresting. So while not unflawed, the book was a good, solid read with interesting philosophical points jabbing the soft, lazy parts of one's novel-reading brain.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.… (meer)