The Scar Night Problem, or ‘why reviews keep screwing me over’

I keep a record of all the books I read, including a short, 30 second summary of my thoughts on the book. I’ve recently finished reading ‘Scar Night’ by Alan Campbell and thought I’d share this particular summary:

Hugely inventive but sometimes macabre just for the sake of it. Ultimately rewarding but a bit of a slog to get to the end.

Now, I don’t want to get into a full review here – Scar Night has been reviewed dozens of times and generally glowingly. However, this book and my final summary of it have brought something home to me that I’ve been noticing a lot recently. I keep reading books that have received brilliant reviews and finding myself not liking them, although I can’t immediately decide why. Let me explain.

Scar Night is, as I mentioned before, hugely inventive. It has more good ideas in it than some authors’ entire back catalogues. It’s beautifully written with fascinating characters and an even more fascinating setting. On my paperback copy, there are eighteen positive blurbs from respectable sources and, as a whole, I agree with what they say. And yet, I’ve really struggled to get to the end of this book. It’s literally taken me weeks to read it.

I encountered this same problem a few months ago with ‘The Lies of Locke Lamora’. Inventive, great fun, well-written and generally well-received by reviewers. And yet, I really struggled to get to the end.

In that case, I decided it was the lack of female characters that put me off. There simply weren’t any, or at least none that got to do anything other than die horribly so that the male characters could feel bad. In the case of Scar Night, it’s more complicated. There are female characters and I even quite like them. So why was this book such damned hard work to read?

I’m still not entirely sure. Ultimately, I think it may be that even though I liked the characters, I couldn’t identify with them. Admittedly, I’m getting close to GCSE English territory here (I hope never again to have to write about why characters are ’sympathetic’ to the reader), but I think my problem with Scar Night is that I feel I have nothing at all in common with any of the characters.

Clearly, this is my problem rather than the book’s, as plenty of other people liked it. Still, I’m starting to be more wary of books which are reviewed in terms of ‘gripping yarn’, ‘thrilling saga’ and ‘vivid imagery’ without really mentioning whether the characters are as believable – and yes, ’sympathetic’ – as they are grotesque.

Because I’ve Actually Made Some Progress

The fact that I’ve actually achieved something in my writing over the past week, despite being snowed under with essays, leads me to this very simple post. Here we have the word counts of my current two projects. The first is the still unnamed novel, which is proceeding nicely (although I’m very close to the end now, so it’s unlikely to actually reach 80k in the first draft):

Secondly, we have the short story, tentatively titled Hush, which is also going well:

And now I have a day of digging in the rain, mud and cold ahead of me on a Roman site in the middle of nowhere. Fingers crossed I find something interesting this time. Stones and clay do not count.

Some Thoughts on Book Reviewing

Note: I’m not a professional book reviewer so, like most of the things on this blog, these are just a few personal thoughts on the process. It may also be that some of the reviewing problems I’ve pointed out here are things I’ve been guilty of myself. After all, I’m still learning. With that out of the way…

Just a few minutes ago, I listened to a podcasted book review.  The reviewer’s thoughts on the book and indeed the name/author of that book are irrelevant for what I want to say, so I’ll leave both anonymous. However, the review itself brought home a few things to me about the process of reviewing and how best to put across your thoughts on a book, or indeed on a film, album or any other item.

I see reviewing as being about an individual’s opinion, even if that individual is reviewing for a newspaper or magazine or some other external publication. For that reason, even if I disagree with a review, I’m willing to accept that some people will feel the same way about the book, if enough reasons for the review are given. To put it bluntly, if you give a book a bad review, that’s not enough: you’ve got to spell out why it’s bad. Perhaps that’s a fairly obvious point, but too often I read or hear reviews in which opinions are not backed up, leaving me no wiser as to whether I’d feel the same way.

Then there are the reviews that simply list points about the book, instead of giving opinions. Individual facts about characters, locations and plot are often meaningless in the context of a review. It’s all very well knowing that the main character is a plumber with three kids, who lives in London and spends his Sunday mornings walking his dalmatian in the park, but unless that information is pertinent to the immediate plot, I’d prefer to find it out from the book itself. Instead, what the review should be telling me is whether that character’s journey from start to finish is interesting and whether the author has told it well.

As a final point, it occurs to me that book reviews are one of those things that are better in moderation. They need to be short, pithy and put across their point as succinctly as possible. If a review can’t tell me quickly whether a book is worth reading, I might as well just take the chance and read the book itself.

And as a final, final point, book reviews should never give away too much of the plot. It’s bad enough reading a blurb that reveals a plot point from two-thirds of the way through (like the book I’m reading now, unfortunately), but reviews tend to go into more detail and that’s even worse. Save exposition for the novel – I just want your opinion!

And It Happened Again…

Yes, I have once again managed to abandon this blog as real life got in the way. I don’t really have an excuse, other than terminal busy-ness – a dissertation to write, a handful of other essays, seminars and presentations, keeping up with fiction writing and reading and even occasionally getting some time to myself. Still, I’m starting to miss having somewhere to splurge my thoughts on writing, so this blog needs to be officially resurrected. As such, an update:

• The novel I’m working on passed 60k words just a couple of days ago. I’m thrilled that I’m finally creeping towards the end, but worried about finishing because the editing process is going to be huge. A lack of planning meant that I changed my mind numerous times about what was going on in the book as I was writing it, so the whole thing is going to have to be ripped apart. Several bits will need completely rewriting, others will need extensive editing and I think I need to add in a whole new sub-plot to draw everything together. It’s going to be hard work, but it’s practice at editing that I really need at the moment.
• In other writing news, I have two new novel ideas floating around in my head (and in the process of being better planned than the one I’m currently writing) alongside a half-finished short story and another short that is waiting to be written.
• In terms of photography, nothing much has happened recently, which is a shame because we’re having a pretty gorgeous autumn. I’m having a short break in York at the start of November though, which should be a chance to get some photos taken.
• The only game I’m really playing at the moment is my beloved Guild Wars, but I’m trying to restrict my gaming time as I’ve got so much other stuff to do.

And that’s it for now.