Mary Papastavrou

The premise of How to Sew Pieces of Cloud Together is an intriguing and original one. In a remote villa in the UK, as part of a new experiment in how to treat prisoners, five convicts are implanted with microchips. If they cross the red line, they automatically die from electrocution. But why would the prisoners want to escape anyway? Their captivity is little like a conventional prison and yet it’s not about rehabilitation really either… and these guys aren’t your average convicts - they’re artists, philosophers, highly intelligent… And it seems that Hoffman, who runs the place, is in the same pecking order as the rest of them.

When the Prison Inspectorate’s Malcom and Rita come to examine the place, things soon unfold towards an unexpected conclusion.

You can tell that the author is versed well in philosophy – especially regarding law, morality, and the whole art imitating life thing. So we find plenty of references to thinkers like Foucault, Nietzsche, Baudrillard and Kafka, as well as references to films like Woody Allen’s ‘Bananas’ and that marvellously dark comedy: Todd Solondz’s ‘Happiness’. Eddie Vedder’s mentioned more than twice ‘n’ all. Despite the amount of references, the author doesn’t overload the reader with them and, in a way, she manages to turn the philosophies on their heads and go beyond the usual arguments concerning law and morality – sometimes in a darkly farcical way.

So there’s much to like in this book, but I just didn’t feel that the whole was as satisfying as it could have been. It felt as though plenty of the parts were great, but when they came together, there was something missing. It took me quite a while to get into it, and I felt like there should have been more of some things and less of others. The changes of narrative tense didn’t really work for me either. More than anything, I just felt that this book needed the hand of a good copy editor, because it had some great ideas that could have been put together better. In fact, I kept thinking that it would work better as a play than as a novel; I just instinctively felt that’s where its home should be. But this novel has had some great reviews, so, hell, what do I know?… (meer)

Turbulence marks this book. Throughout the immediacy and honed character projections there is a juddering fluctuation that makes the experience of reading it at once disconcerting and enticing. An experiment is the conceit, a group defined by the cerebral and the base, and the eternal sliver of an attempt to reconcile the two. Here the forces of rationalization and classification mirror those aspects they try to address, slowly extricating the absurdity of arbitrary labels and collective definitions.

There is weariness in the humour, balanced with a wry bitterness and warm acceptance. The writing is at once extremely knowing regarding the vagaries and eccentricities of human nature and full of the embracing of the vitality of characters interacting whilst driven by extremes of emotional behaviour. Here, we are given the outlines of characters that make their initial appearances whole, a deep quirky psychology at work giving this short novel a real density. It is a book that rewards investment.

A core aspect is the attention given to the ritual of accepted interaction and the focus on how this can be staged and played out. Numerous misunderstandings, perceived misunderstandings, veiled agendas and second-guessing add up to the sometimes farcical, sometimes blackest amusements. Here, the actors in this life take on a horrific existential uncertainty, conspirators in their own plot constructed from reels of suggestion and assumptions based on invented presumptions. Until they all break down into a tangled heap of battered wills.

This is a work of perception in relation to the dance of interpersonal power plays and of a keenly brought rich intelligence. It should be praised for the intensity of the layering and the representation of characters blighted by the connivance of circumstance. I look forward to being challenged further by this writer in the future.… (meer)