Cultural Dessert

'The Rain Before It falls' by Jonathan Coe

26 August 2008

Jonathan Coe is one of my favourite contemporary authors: I loved his novels 'What a Carve Up!', 'The House of Sleep', 'The Rotters' Club' and its sequel 'The Closed Circle'. Coe's latest novel, 'The Rain Before It Falls' is quite a different kind of book. It feels more conventional and straightforward though it does use an interesting narrative device: most of the story is told as the main character reflects on her life by describing a series of twenty photographs. This creates an episodic telling of a dramatic family saga focusing mainly on mothers and daughters. It's a sad tale without any of the set-piece comedy or the political links to current events of Coe's earlier books. The story kept my attention and was very moving but I was hoping for something more. After finishing the novel I began to wonder whether I was missing a subtle twist. Were we not supposed to trust the narrator through whose eyes we have been looking? Was there something she wasn't telling us? Or was this simply what it seemed - a well-written, gripping, melancholy tale?

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 4:48 pm