This was a pretty confounding read for me. It gets praised to the skies a lot (see for example here and here), and I can understand why. It has a really intriguing premise--it doesn't just retell a love-triangle story from mythology, but depicts three teenagers possessed by magical/spiritual echoes of the myth and forced to act it out in the valley where it's supposed to have actually taken place.
Part of the "problem" is that the myth is Welsh. If it's part of your cultural heritage, and already woven into your imaginative life, then my guess is that you'd find this quite resonant and affecting. If you're as unfamiliar with the myth as I was, however, I don't think this novel quite gets it all across. To me, it was just a love-triangle with some peculiar embroidery. I figured there must be more to it than that, but I wasn't picking up on it.
Even worse, Garner uses the reenacted myth as an occasion for commentary on various social divisions that may not mean a lot to anyone outside the British Isles. I think this must account for some of the disconnect between the distribution of positive and negative reviews between amazon and amazon.co.uk readers.
Garner also interposes a prior enactment between the original one and the one taking place in the 1967 present of the story. I think he might have done better in his choice of details for how that all played out. Instead of suggesting powerful cycles of recurrence, which I believe it was supposed to do, it interjected some really off-notes of unwelcome banality.
Unless there's more to the ending than I noticed, it wraps up a little too quickly and easily. And, for all that, pretty obscurely, as well. I came away thinking, "That's all he had to do to accomplish . . . whatever that was?"
Like I said, this book is obviously much-beloved by some, so your mileage may vary, but I can't recommend it.
2 comments:
You may also be just a bit too old/well read for this book to work the way it did for a lot of British readers, who'll have encountered it in their youth. This is one of those books that work better at twelve than at thirtytwo.
Not British, but loved the book. I think the hardest part for me was getting used to the rhythm of the writing. But I was very much drawn in to what, I think, is a fabulous retelling.
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