Customer Reviews

Blackmoor (Charnwood)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book - which I hesitate to quite dub a novel - is an extreme example of a couple rather irritating features of modern fiction: 1.) A lovely, intriguing concept, bolstered by glowing puffs by reviewers followed by, not poor execution, but no execution. Without giving anything particular away from what is supposed and touted to be a sort of mystery novel, there is nothing mysterious revealed here at all. Further, there is absolutely no suspense or mystery at all in Blackmoor itself, the book or the town. Indeed, the book might be accurately described as a scraping away, from the first chapter to the last, of whatever sense of mystery or suspense the reader feels. The novella-length book is far too short for the characters to develop any psychological depth whatsoever. So, Beth, Vincent and George all leave the reader not with a feeling of lingering mystery, but simple emptiness. There never was anything to them after all. 2.) Creative writing class prose which, indeed, offers ever so many pretty sentences, but the sentences don't connect to anything more substantial than themselves, or perhaps a hastily penned atmosphere, which feels as shallow as the characters herein. In other words, what this book lacks is depth of any sort.

Two stars for the pretty, in spots, prose. But this is a book that is as soon forgotten as it is closed.

The story opens as Vincent Cartwright enters his teenage years. Vincent leads his awkward, bullied life, not far from the site of Blackmoor, a former Derbyshire pit village that no longer exists. The life and death of his mother Beth in that same village has always been a dark secret about which Vincent's farther George does not speak.
What happened in Blackmoor? What happened to the village, to its community and to Beth Cartwright? As Vincent grows older, he becomes more curious about the past and seeks to find out the truth behind his mother's life and death in this mysterious, abandoned mining village.

This book moves between the present - where Vincent and his father George struggle to deal with life a decade after Beth's death, and the past and the events leading to Beth's death. This is a moving story about a young woman who was different and the causes and consequences of not belonging. This is also a story of a teenager seeking for answers.

I found the writing in this debut novel wonderful, and I look forward to reading more of Mr Hogan's work. This novel won the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novelists in 2009.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith