I was given this book a while back for a birthday, and was excited to read it for so long. To my disappointment, it didn’t live up to expectations, nor the praise that lavishes its’ front cover.
That’s not to say, it isn’t well written, and has its merits, but overall I found the plot quite flat. It is around 500 pages long and I think, if it was half the length, it could have achieved exactly the same ending/message that it felt it needed 500 pages for. It’s difficult to write about why I didn’t enjoy the book, because I feel like I’m personally attacking the author.
ButI am just expressing my experience on reading this book and don’t really want to rip into it, because it’s not a ‘bad book’, I just didn’t jive with it!
The Plot
I am not sure it has a plot, like beginning, middle and end, which maybe is part of the reason I didn’t enjoy it. It is set in the capital city of Sierra Leone, Freetown. The frame narrative, I guess you could call it is a British psychiatrist, Adrian treating patients in a facility, near one of the cities hospital.
The secondary plot is that of, ex-university professor, Elias Cole, now one of Adrian’s patients. Cole is dying and telling Adrian his history of when he met, and became obsessed with Saffia, a friends wife. The narrative flits back to the moment he first saw her in 1969. This narrative, however is not succinct and is interspersed with the life of Adrian, and his surgeon friend Kai in the present. In the background of it all, is the memory of civil war in the country.
As you can see, by appearances it is quite a higgledy-piggledy plot. We get in-depth chapters of plot from Adrian’s life, Kai’s life, and Elias Cole’s past, and they loosely linked but never really cross over until perhaps the end.
MMMhhh
It is easy to say you don’t like something, but not as easy to pinpoint a reason why. At times I felt reading this, it was being a bit too artsy poetic for its own good, perhaps too emotive, when what was needed was clarity and sparky events to move the plot forward. It feels caught up in the emotions of its title too much, this idea of the memory of love doesn’t feel present in the central characters, as much as to warrant the title having such a poeticism to it.
I think perhaps I missed something, but then again I think maybe it wasn’t so clear….
Here’s to books we don't like ....
Saying all this I do understand the devastation that surrounds the theme of memory in this novel. All these characters are faced with the task of their memories and pasts coming back into their present, in a country that is doing the same coming out of a civil war.
Overall I found reading this quite laborious, and struggled to get to the end because I wasn’t really invested in any of characters enough to want to know what happened.
I did finish however and stand by my initial statement that it doesn’t seem to have the pay-off the reader wants by the end. Neither has this book put me off the author. Give it a try and tell me if you enjoy it more than me!- I’m open to having my mind changed!
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