What’s BookieMonster Reading?: The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy by Barbara Vine

How can someone write so well? Vine has that amazing knack of making her writing seem totally effortless, even while you know there must be a huge amount of effort going into it.

Gerald Candless is a writer – a popular, but literary writer (it was kind of teehee the way Vine emphasised this point several times) who dies suddenly of a heart attack. His publisher asks one of his daughters to write a “memoir” of his life and she discovers he was not who he said he was. And it continues from there (ack, can you tell I hate plot summaries).

To begin with an understatement, these are not nice people. To be crass and colloquial about it, Gerald Candless and his two adoring daughters are total dicks. You know those people who manage to combine being utterly self-absorbed with being completely devoid of self-awareness or insight into their own motivations and actions? These are those people.

Vine’s writing is so good that fortunately you manage to see past their dickishness and into what is an intriguing story – one with a few twists and also unseen (by the main characters) coincidences as well as moments where the wilful non-communication by these people means they remain in the dark about many things (fortunately we as readers don’t). Plus the subplot about Ursula, Candless’ wife and the mother of his two daughters, is sweet and touching and also a nice counterpoint.

The publisher’s blurb about the book characterises it as a psychological thriller, but that makes it sound far more plot-driven than it is – this is a book about people, what makes them do the things they do and what makes them be the way they are. There is no real sense of suspense here (or at least there wasn’t for me, because Gerald’s “secret” is pretty much obvious from the first page), and the ending revelation is more “oh, ok” than “No. No. That’s not true. That’s impossible!“.

But the writing, oh the writing. It’s just so good you’ll keep reading and reading and reading every page and hating the characters and reading.

3 out of 4 little black BookieMonster Kitteh paws up.