Customer Reviews

Until the Deep Water Stills

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What a great idea, to combine the best of two worlds - literature and the Internet - and create a novel that is "Internet enhanced" - that is interactive. That's just what author Michael Robert Dyet did with his debut novel, Until the Deep Water Stills, in which readers can go to a web address at the end of each chapter to read further information on that chapter and its characters, and to view cool photographs. The novel itself is about how two married couples deal with their feelings of falling out of love, and drifting apart from each other, and how a tragic event causes them to find love again. Also, a charismatic social worker, Faith Catherwood, who longs for love is the catalyst for change in the lives of the other four main characters. If you enjoy reading novels about the theme of love lost, love found, then you will probably like reading this book very much.

The chapters of the novel are divided up among these five characters and the plot is seen through their individual perspectives. The reader can see the dissolution of their love from both the male and female's point of view in each case this way, and get deeper insights as to how and why the couples drift apart. Going online is not necessary to understanding and fully enjoying the novel, but it adds to the experience. There are, for instance, blog entries you can read, and you can see some of the photographs that the character Katherine Orr, who is trying to start up a career in photography, has taken. Some of the photographs are very beautiful, and including them is a nice touch that helps to immerse the readers of the novel more completely into the lives of its characters and makes them more realistic.

The two couples are the aforementioned Katherine Orr, whose husband Jayce doesn't want her to go back to work because he fears her desire to do so is a sign that she wants to gain enough economic freedom to leave him, and Bryan (Katherine's brother-in-law) and his wife Grace (her sister). Bryan and Grace's teenage daughter died of a drug overdose and dehydration at a Rave, and both of them handle their daughter's death very differently, Bryan wanting to hold the memories of Sarah close, to visit her grave, and try to understand more about what happened, while Grace seems colder, and wants to emotionally detach herself from the memories, likely afraid they'll hurt her too much if she dwells on them.

Then, there's Faith, who lived a wild life when she was a teenager, but now has come up with the idea of having Drug-Free Raves, and has one in honor of Sarah. Bryan attends and is surprised to hear Faith dedicating the Rave to his daughter. He wishes Grace would have attended also, but he knows she has a hard time dealing with the situation, and would prefer not to deal with it at all, if given a choice. When he talks about his relationship with Grace to Katherine at the Rave, and they're both questioning whether or not their spouses still love them, Bryan tells her his feelings about what happens to love in a marriage over the years, saying that there are high and low points:

"Marriage is like that. There are peaks and valleys. God knows Grace and I
are in a valley right now. But you have to believe you'll get through it. Or past it
or over it. That's what love is all about."

There are some annoying grammatical errors, such as sentence fragments, that distracted me from getting into the story. Also, there are sometimes unusual capitalizations of letters, like in chapter 5, when she refers to the press conference about the Drug-Free Rave series as a "Press Conference," and in chapter 6, when Faith muses about "Peregrine Falcons" instead of peregrine falcons. The novel would have benefitted, in my opinion, from having been proofread more thoroughly. Still, overall, it's a pretty interesting book, and the web site is appealingly designed.

Until the Deep Water Stills is a novel that will invoke deep emotions from its readers, and make them think about the nature of love and how its peaks and valleys often transform interpersonal relationships over the years. Its use of the Internet really adds a lot of interest to the novel, and makes reading the book an interactive experience. It's not a perfect book, grammatically speaking, at any rate; but, story-wise, it's a very good debut from a talented author whom I'm looking forward to reading more from in the future. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes to read romance novels and books about the dissolution and rebuilding of relationships.


--Douglas R. Cobb--

The five central characters in this novel are locked in grief, constantly psychoanalysing themselves, their actions and those of others. Michael Dyet uses elaborate layering in his prose to draw his characters down, deeper until they reach the still water at the bottom and emerge from their condition. Not all arrive though: some are locked in anger and hate, and self-destruct enroute; others, ensnared in the guilt stage, engage in self-destructive behaviour and are left damaged and having damaged those nearest to them as well.

This is not a book for the meek of heart, it took me some time to get through it.

The interesting added dimension to this book is the Internet component that reveals more of the characters and their secrets. The affair that Katherine conducts happens mostly in this dimension and I would have missed it had I not read her online journal. I think Dyet has hit on the future of the book - with the technology available and emerging - it could become a multi media experience. My only concern as a fellow writer is that we writers will have to do more to sell our new creations for the same price that a regular book sells today - providing accompanying blogs, interviews, voice-overs and even video footage. Kudos, however to Dyet for showing us how and for stretching the known form into something more complex and rich

Shane Joseph www.shanejoseph.com