Serious Sweet by A.L. KennedyMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
I picked up this novel simply because it's on the Booker 2016 longlist. And it's possibly a decision I shall live to regret for a while coming.
The story is essentially about two people, Jon and Meg, who are having a bad day. But they meet each other and love is in the air and that's supposed to be the crux of it. Well, can I just say that a simple story like that does not need to drag itself over 500+ pages.
I wouldn't complain about the length of the book if there are had been some fantastic substance in every given page. But there wasn't. It's awful, meandering and pretentious prose pretending to be erudite. Am I sounding harsh? Good, because that's the point.
This book needed a serious editor. One who would slash the junk and make it resemble something close to coherent. At the very least, the editor could have weeded out the typos - of which there were one too many.
The biggest problem with this book is that in its effort to copy the patterns of real-life speech it comes across as completely garbled. I felt like there were more ellipses in this book than alphabets. Given how often professors of writing courses declare war on ellipses and italics, it's a surprise to see plenty of both in the book.
The internal monologues of the characters are all in italics, which is a pain to read visually, as well as stylistically. Too many expository monologues in between the scenes halted proceedings and made the characters read as pedantic. In short, they were annoying.
There's a section early on when Meg is at the gynaecologist and her every move is followed by an italicised thought along the lines of 'I can't do this today.' For goodness' sake! The woman is over forty, get it together and just meet the bloody doc! Why she's at the doc, however, is never made clear, because it's part of an extended overlong monologue that has lots of words in it but zero meaning or context.
Both protagonists come across as being on the autism spectrum, with manic-depressive tendencies. I suppose we're supposed to believe they're just having a bad day, but that's not it. Of course, one would understand their circumstances better if any context and explanations of their current situations were actually provided.
Nothing makes sense because it is, as mentioned above, written in fragments. Very few pieces of dialogue by the protagonists are written in complete paragraphs. The only character who seemingly always speaks in complete sentences is Jon's colleague, Chalice. His menacing monologues were well-written but out of place as we had no preamble for his threats. Turns out there was some corporate espionage going on that completely flew past my head. I want to put it down to the fact that I'm not British enough to understand it all, but I think the fact that there is literally no information or inclination towards politicking given in the book contributed to me missing this plotline.
While Jon gets to suffer several different kinds of existential crises (divorced from his wife, worried about his growing daughter and her affairs, a weird letter-writing fetish, mean colleagues, bringing down his company - apparently - and a burgeoning new relationship), Meg gets to be an ex-alcoholic whose entire story becomes all about Jon and the need to be with him partway through the book. There's also the suggestion (I think) of childhood and adult abuse, because there is no way in hell we could have a female protagonist who didn't suffer abuse and get defined by it. How, as a woman writer, the author couldn't give Meg more substance is beyond me.
And let us not forget the overly-pretentious fillers sporadically decorating the entire book. Written as tableaux of typical London life, they come across as unbidden interruptions in an overlong story. They add to page length, and nothing else. They have no bearing on the main story, nor do they impact the characters in anyway.
The book frustrated me throughout. It annoyed me that it had not been edited, and that it's ambition wasn't reigned in. This isn't a book made for readers. I know some people liked it, they liked it enough to nominate it for the Booker, but this just makes me wonder if that's an apt yardstick for judging the best books published in Britain.
The book has the times of the day preceding several segments, and a few pages in, I couldn't wait for it to read midnight. The only problem is, when it did read midnight there was still half the book left. Suffice to say it left me quite bereft. I have never been happier to shut a book. In conclusion, by reading this review I have saved you the effort of having to trudge through endless pages of tedious pretension.
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