Cultural Dessert

'Pieces of Light' by Adam Thorpe

21 July 2008

Adam Thorpe first came to my attention when his incredible debut novel 'Ulverton' received glowing praise from the critics. This tale of an imaginary English village over centuries of history through a series of 'discovered' documents is a tour-de-force but I'm afraid the painstaking use of historically accurate dialect made many sections of the book unbearably difficult for this reader to plough through. It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I approached Adam Thorpe's third novel 'Pieces of Light' - but I needn't have worried. 'Pieces of Light' starts as the story of a young boy growing up in a English missionary family in Cameroon in the 1920s. This is an interesting, if fairly unremarkable, tale but when the narrative shifts at the end of the first section you realise you're entering a much more complex and satisfying work. Without the difficult-to-read dialect to wade through I realised how much I had forgotten about the strengths of 'Ulverton': Thorpe is an intricate plotter and can be very funny. In 'Pieces of Light' he continues to use the narrative device of 'found documents' so, while the novel is all told in the first person, you begin to appreciate that it is very important in each section to work out who is telling the story and when they are telling it. It reminded me at times of 'Cloud Atlas' by David Mitchell (which it pre-dates). 'Pieces of Light' is maybe a bit long (nearly 500 pages) and drags a little in the middle but I found it compulsive reading - desperate to try to work out its riddles before being left puzzled by its remaining ambiguities. Now I want to read it all again! In particular Thorpe very cleverly evokes both the confused world-view of a young boy and the adult's less than perfect reinterpretations of mis-remembered childhood events.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 4:31 pm