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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This is a love story...with a sting in the tail,
This review is from: More Lives Than One (Paperback)
It's about a life together that could have been perfect, but for a secret.
The book's `blurb' warns of disaster, but there's no hint while you're reading it when or who it will strike. The story accelerates and events suddenly spin out of control. There are lots of interesting twists in the storytelling but the final twist (and sting) comes out of the blue - my only criticism is that it is a bit far fetched, and though you feel sorry for the characters, you're not entirely sure you should. Although the book is unevenly paced it didn't at any point lose my interest.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
MORE TALENTS THAN ONE,
By DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: More Lives Than One (Paperback)
To get the maximum enjoyment out of this book I suspect one has to be familiar with the author as a radio journalist. She has a style all of her own as the leader of an intellectual discussion programme at 9a.m. on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesdays - bright, alert, witty and always friendly - and on top of the style she has a particularly attractive voice. Being used to her helps in two ways when reading the book - it sharpens one's appreciation of some of the best and most characteristic sequences, and it helps us get through the second-best bits.
I would say this novel is a bit of a curate's egg. The start really did strike me as rather dull and conventional, written in a familiar airport-bookstall idiom, albeit an upmarket version of that. Before making her career in broadcasting Libby Purves had been a particularly brilliant graduate of the school of English at Oxford. So far as I could tell, this particular school required a reading-capacity analogous in its power of extraction and absorption to that of the Japanese deep-sea fishing fleet. How anyone who had undergone this process retained the smallest capacity to appreciate literature I never understood, and I find myself still intrigued and uncertain about that when I read this creative effort by one of the most triumphant survivors of the ordeal. She does a good deal of quoting, but I'm not certain what the quotations really mean to her other than a kind of display of jewellery. For one thing, the very title of the book puzzles me. The actual words are taken from Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol, but read from that point of view I'm not sure of their relevance. Where they do seem to fit the narrative particularly well is in the way Purves keeps switching the focus of the thoughts and action from one character to another, a feature that I would call particularly skilful and successful, except that I'm not too sure to what extent the author consciously intended it or meant it to reflect the book's title. Another matter is the plot line or lines. Up to the point of the return of the school party from Venice, everything seems fine to me. The characterisation has been good, the situations convincing, the insights varied and the quality of the writing much better than at the start, with some very witty touches that are all the more effective if one's mind's ear hears the author's own voice in them. The press notices that I've seen also pay particular tribute to the evocativeness of the writing about Venice itself, and I'm only too happy to endorse this estimate. What convinces me rather less is the final denouement. This has been `prepared for' in a rather perfunctory way earlier in the story, but it still has rather the feel of a tail pinned on to the donkey as in the children's game. I don't complain that the author doesn't take sides in the `nature vs nurture' argument, I do complain that she raises a new and slightly contrived issue like this towards the end of the story, fails to integrate it properly with anything that went before and takes no particular stance of her own concerning it. It all left me feeling that the story didn't really conclude in any convincing or satisfactory way but rather petered out. If I ever read the book again, which I suppose is doubtful, I may revise this opinion. In the meantime, most of the book seemed to me very worthwhile and involving. The school staffroom politics in particular were acutely touched on, and above all the issues of the vulnerability of schoolteachers to irresponsible accusations that receive even more irresponsible support, and of the way that rumour can spread and be spread so that it becomes the shapeless and hideous monster that Virgil called it, reveal a major talent. I'd call this a pretty good novel all things considered, and my guess is that it will please most of its readers.
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