Customer Reviews

Betrayals

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm surprised by the unenthusiastic tone of the other reviews. I would assume that anyone who read Betrayals had read, at least, Palliser's first novel, The Quincunx, and would expect a book to be enjoyed more for its the beauty and wizardry of language than an exciting plot.

I will admit up front that I read Betrayals years ago and, it's definitely not in the class of The Qunicunx, which I've re-read about three times.

Yet Betrayals is truly a suberb book. More in the tone of Umberto Eco (Palliser is surely playing a semiotic theme) than Dickens, Betrayals presents a series of short stories with seemingly distinct plots that slowly and masterfully become entwined. We don't know which story is a subplot of the last, or the master plot of the next. Different chapters confront the same events not only from different points of view of the characters, but from different levels of plot. Is a murder told as news? as the plot of a bad television show? or the background to a love affair.

One turns the pages of Betrayals not to reveal the plot -- that is learned early. One turns the pages to discover the talent of Palliser in weaving the different layers into something not truly a novel, not truly a collection, but truly successful.

I've read this book a few times, and it never fails to amuse me with its intricately woven stories, wicked satire, and twisted plots. Perhaps it's not everyone's cup of tea (as other reviews have shown) but I loved the mix of 19th century convoluted plotting (a la Wilkie Collins or Palliser's own Quincunx) and send-ups of modern literary theory, in the form of a literary critic cum cult leader, and such luminaries as Jeffery Archer, seen here as an egotistical politician turned plagarist. I am not a fan of books as puzzles, but this is no postmodern deconstruction of fiction; it's just a funny take on a thematically linked short story collection.

The book attempts to be an observation about the unreliability of language. Stories turn out to be of questionable accuracy as further clues about them are found later in the book. There are slips of the tongue, accusations of plagiarism and many different variations of a story and these also cast doubt on the reliability of the stories told. The chapter involving Galvanauskas with its emphasis on the critical theory about the struggle by the reader to master a text seems to be a way of throwing down the gauntlet to the reader. However the author gets too carried away with his admittedly clever games and they become the point of the book instead of whatever he wants to say about language. Ultimately, there is not enough payoff to justify the time the reader has to spend nailing down the complications. Also, "An Open Mind", the long chapter in the middle, has a non-credible central character and this completely takes the steam of the book.

I've read all the other works by Palliser I've been able to get my hands on and especially enjoyed Quincunx, so I was looking forward to reading this. But I have to say that having finished it, I in fact have no idea what the author intended by it--and yes, although I minored in semiotics in grad school and enjoy playful texts, I do believe in authorial intention and in this case could not determine what it was. There were plenty of humorous moments; I was laughing out loud at the obnoxious popular author towards the end. I liked how well Palliser used language for characterization (the arrogant authors who consistently misspelled or used words incorrectly, like infer/imply). I felt a bit wary when I got to the Galvanauskas part, since I have read all too many obnoxious attacks on post-structuralism, but it seemed to me to be much more like just poking fun. Galvanauskas felt like a combo of maybe Paul de Man and Foucault and perhaps Sebeok. There were also horrific bits, like the whole incident in the jungle with the archeologist/Jesuit. The long section in the middle, however, was tedious. It felt exactly like what it was supposed to be--someone going on and on and on about a TV show. I was frankly looking forward to one of the characters in that bit ending up dead.

It's true none of the characters are likeable, but that doesn't stop a story from being enjoyable. And I have no problems with novels composed of other genres, like obituaries, reports, notebooks, etc., such as this. The definition of the novel is that it is able to incorporate such genres to create a world. For me the problem was that I did not see what the point was. Yes, it was neat to have all these interconnections and characters reappearing in other stories and morphing the narrative and so forth. But why? It did not even seem to be making a comment on lit. I felt very puzzled when I finished it.

A highly intelligent and entertaining book, forthose who like Dickens, crime novels a la Agatha Christieor Conan Doyle, Conrad or Kipling...

"What is this gap, this silence, from which the phallic text speaks and yet remains silent? What is it but the text's phallus? What but, precisely and exactly, that phallic moment from which it has spun itself like a disavowal, a lie. For what is a phallic text if not a lie that has to be unmasked, its strategies outwitted?"



What indeed?! And what fiend of a novel would pitch such twisted plays of language, slips of tongue, professional and academic intrigues embellished with the diabolical offenses of murder and plagiarism to this sensitive reader's eye, never to reason why?



Well, BETRAYALS would, and does... actually.



Truly (or somewhat so), what author Charles Palliser has herein compiled is a series of playfully interconnected novellas into a whole that's quite unlike anything I'd ever read before: even entirely unlike UNBURIED and THE QUINCUNX, the other two Palliser novels I have read.



To wit, I have not much to say about the plot, for there is no plot really- there are many. Though I suppose there is a central theme: that being taken from the title itself. There are, however, certain characters whom one may gleefully take to heart and embrace, (the matter, of course, not being whether you like them at all or not- as you'll find, rather, that it's more often that you won't much anyway). -Among my own personal favorites are Galvanauskas- the charismatic intellectual who's somewhat of a sadistic madman (and yet, he's so much more than that-) and Sholto, the mild-mannered bookseller who's practically illiterate, but keeps a diary and has braying sociopathic tendencies (and yet again, so much more to him than just this)!



The twists are abundant here as chapter by chapter the plots take surprising turns- with each story, each point of view, and every angle beyond propriety being navigated, introspected, convoluted, dissected, then thrown to the wind like confetti- the bits falling for recycling where they may.......



I cannot deny that essentially, BETRAYALS was an enjoyable page-turner - and parts of it had me chuckling aloud. Yet this book actually had the potential to be a masterpiece of the cleverest persuasion -- but alas, in the end it came up well short. In my view, the conclusion was not well in keeping with the body of the work: it was anticlimactic and left a few & sundry questions unanswered.



Then again- I do, upon many an occasion since having finished reading it, find myself asking: could BETRAYALS have just been another one of those terribly rampant cases of "the text not properly interrogated," and therefore not "induced to make its voluntary sacrifice" to the power of the critic, therefore becoming "emasculated, and thus made to speak like the tongueless boy"? Hmmm...



Indeed, I do not know- and so I ponder on...

I find this book unreadable. I read the first half and scanned the rest. I found it rather like a joke played on the reader rather than a novel. If this was a parody of style, it would work better if the reader was very familiar with the styles being parodied. I felt betrayed for having bought it. No character, if any could be called that, appeared to be remotely likeable.