Customer Reviews

In the Place of Fallen Leaves

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book tells the story of the hottest summer of the 20th Century from the point of view of a family living in rural Devon. It is quite simply a stunning book that is written so that the characters seem so real and touching. It is sensitive and is almost dreamlike in its narrative. The heat of that summer is conveyed so well that you feel as though you are living it. As one other reviewer said it is "intoxicating and magical" and I would fully agree with that. A superb book.

Not necessarily a book I would have selected myself, but from the first page I was captivated. One of the most magical novels I have read in years. Pears' prose is wonderfully poetic, the story is charming, enigmatic, subtle and devastatingly thought-provoking. A truly stunning masterpiece. If you read but one novel this year, make it this one.

I purchased this book on accident, thinking it was Iain Pears("An Instance of the Fingerpost"). I almost didn't read itwhen I noticed my mistake, but as a voracious reader, I just couldn't let it go to waste on my bookshelf.

I loved this book from the very first page. Mr. Pears is an excellent story teller, and I hope that "In the Place of Fallen Leaves" earns it's rightful place among other classics such as "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "A Separate Peace".

Not a book I would ever have considered buying on reading the publishers description, but having been given it as a gift, I picked it up and was hooked immediately. There are some writers who, whatever the subject matter, have a natural ability to draw you in and Tim Pears is definitely one - a master of seemingly effortless prose. One reviewer said he could make washing-up sound interesting. Fantastic - put aside your doubts - I did - and give it a try.

I was blown away by this novel. What a treat! The 13 year-old narrator, Alison, floats around the many members of her family during one of the dryest summers in the history of England, making very perceptive observations about all of them. Because her dad ruined his brain thanks to too much cider, her oldest brother Ian runs the farm, helped by brother Tom and the guidance of Grandfather. Alison becomes friends with a boy her age, Jonathan, and they spend a summer of discovery. A parellel story is the tender romance between the Rector and Maria, the Portuguese lady. The Rector is a sweet, sweet man, far less in control of himself than he thinks.

I loved the humor (the Green is renamed "The Brown", because all the grass dried up). I loved the dialect ("bay" for "boy"). I wish i could have been in Alison's shoes when i was 13.

Elegantly written, Pears' first novel is the story of a Devon village during the summer of 1984, the hottest and driest in memory.

"It was the summer the world stopped turning on the spiral of history, the summer we spent waiting for the world to begin again, when the sun hung above the village and poured a hot glue that slowed everything down."

Narrator Alison Freemantle looks back from adulthood onto that summer of her ambivalent coming-of-age (freeing Pears from the constraints of a 13-year-old's understanding or, especially, use of language). She contemplates the changes in her body and forms a secretive friendship with the Viscount's shy son. She also comes perilously close to losing her life in impulsive, childish stunts - swimming alone in the deepest section of the quarry pool, striking a match in a dry barn full of hay.

The book opens in September, when summer should be over and school should have begun. But the teachers are on strike and the drought has taken on an implacable force that saps the will of warm blooded creatures. "Gradually, though, objects took on a life of their own and moved without the spirits' help, rising from the surfaces of furniture through empty air that the heat had squeezed even gravity out of."

Recalling that summer in all its torrid detail, Alison wanders into the history of her family - her bookish, now-blind, strong-willed grandmother; her taciturn, hard-working grandfather; her sad-fated, childlike father; solid, enduring mother; her two brothers, one so stolid and silent, the other a quivering mass of nerves and worries, her sister who already seems a guest on the verge of leaving.

Alison draws us into the lives of the other villagers as well - the Rector who wrestles intellectually with his faith in an empty 26-room house, the brooding farmer who'd left home for a dozen years when his father criticized his table manners, the hedge-layer, Martin, "the friendliest man in the village, and the most lonely."

Slowly, at various intervals over the course of Alison's free-ranging story, the details of their histories emerge, until each character stands revealed, perfectly ordinary and wondrously strange, with lives of poignant heroisms, hard-won joys and crushing defeats.

Dialogue is in the vernacular of the Devon countrypeople and the characters are farmers, each with a supplemental trade - slaughterer, glazier. The Freemantles are no different, yet, choosing wives from outside the village, they stand slightly apart, slightly more prosperous, with a bigger house.

Under the singular heat the soil turns to dust, the hay dries to wisps in the fields, the cows' ribs protrude, the hens eggs turn transparent and yolkless. Tension simmers, occasionally erupts. There is death and betrayal. Love affairs begin and end. But there is no single driving event, no plot. That the novel succeeds in grabbing and holding the reader is due to the Alison's strong and lively narrative voice - quite a feat for any novelist, amazing in a novice.
Humorous, sad, magical, "In the Place of Fallen Leaves" is a beautiful novel.

This book is certainly one of the finest short novels I've ever read. The writing is so poetic and continually stunning that, like the heat in the Devonshire summer in which it is set, it takes one's breath away. And yet author Tim Pears never allows his stylism to obtrude into the story and, more significantly, the narratives of the characters' past and present lives in the village as told by narrator Alison. Rather, he very deftly weaves it into the structure of the book so that the reader unwittingly succumbs to the feeling that s/he is spiralling around something lovely and tender at the very heart of life. For, despite the tragedies inherent in mucking through the world as a sentient being which are scattered throughout the book, the feeling with which one comes away from the reading of it is one of almost desperate tenderness such as only the best poetry usually evokes.

Here is a sampling:

"The women of the village sweating around the stoves, after calling from their kitchens, finally stepped outside and proceeded to follow each other without consultation, pulled not by their will but by impulses so far out on the edges of their senses that they were unaware of them at the time. It was only afterwards that they were able to infer from traces in the sediment of their memories that they must have been drawn by the inaudible screeching and the blurred tilting of wings of seagulls, and by the intangible taste of salt in the air..."

So rich and lovely is the language and so simple the tale that I felt completely as one with narrator Alison by the end, "lost in the beauty and the strangeness of the earth."

"The afternoon was at its height: the sun had just begun its slow descending curve towards Cornwall and was slumbering on the wing. A drowsy hornet drifted by. The harsh air rasped my throat as I inhaled, and my eyelids felt heavy as velvet ... In the hedge to our right I spotted a ripe blackberry, and as daddy reached over to pluck it another appeared, then another. Soon his lips and tongue were stained purple. He lay down in the shadowed verge and fell asleep, and I joined him." - from IN THE PLACE OF FALLEN LEAVES

In his novel, Notwithstanding, based on rural life in the English county of Surrey, author Louis de Bernières calls IN THE PLACE OF FALLEN LEAVES by Tim Pears a "beautiful book." And, indeed, it is.

IN THE PLACE OF FALLEN LEAVES is set in the rusticity of Devon, a south coast shire further to the west of Surrey and one short of that of Land's End, Cornwall. It's the end of a stifling hot summer in the year 1984, and the main character is thirteen-year old Alison, who lives with her two older brothers, Tom and Ian, her older sister Pamela, and her parents and grandparents on a generations-held farm somewhere near the mouth of the Teign River in the triangle of land formed by the towns of Exeter, Torquay, and Newton Abbot.

Alison serves as the narrator of/participant in contemporary events of that September and October and as chronicler of past family history before her time. From the tenor of her narrative, the reader can almost feel the heat that oppresses the region and taste the dust that swirls off the parched land.

As in NOTWITHSTANDING, the affection and empathy of Pears for his book's characters is sumptuously evident. But whereas the former is essentially a series of short stories connected only by its locale, the latter is threaded beginning to end by Alison and her kin even as the author weaves-in other major personae, such as the parish Rector and Johnathan, the son of the former landlord, Viscount Teignmouth, who sold out to a property developer.

A necessary element of any novel is adversity, which, here, is provided by the effects of the sizzling weather and the challenge of several critical events within the family itself. So, for Alison, it becomes a story of maturation and, for the family, one of survival. As crafted by Tim's pen, it's lovingly done, though I do wonder slightly if his depiction of Alison and her perspective would be different if he were a woman. Oh well, no matter, really.

I imagine coming-of-age novels set in rural places number in the thousands. So, why read this one? Well, if your love for England, like mine, is relatively far greater than that for, say, Nebraska, the Philippines, the Ukraine, or any other place, then that's reason enough.

This is a book to get lost in. As are all his books.You cannot put it down. His characters are deep and interesting.Nothing phoney about the people or their behaviours. Love it!

I won't explain what the book is about, as that was done in the other reviews. My biggest problem with this book is the writing style. I REALLY had a hard time getting through it. This book had so many strange sentence constructions and digressions that when I was less than half-way through it, I lost patience and finished the book by reading the first sentence of each paragraph except when it got more interesting. I was tempted to abandon the book altogether because of the style but finished it because I wanted to find out how it ended, and because I hate wasting money. No-one other reviewer has had the same complaint about the book so maybe it's just me...