If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Started Early, Took My Dog?Īny scene with the ludicrous VoiceOver of "Julia" irritating any sense of a story moving forward, all the contrived scenes of drunken divorced middle age man, all the unrealistic imaginings of how a scene might play out in the memory of an unreliable narrator.the list is endless. His attempts at colouring the reading only served to highlight just how bleak and empty the prose is. Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Nicholas Bell?Ī man less earnest. Why jumble together a book about, " my rambles through the Abbeys of England" with, " my terrible divorce and the sordid aftermath" and " child abduction without preamble" and " ugly musings by an old man" in what might have been a detective novel? What was most disappointing about Kate Atkinson’s story? What a jumbled, grey, damp morass of non events. When I glanced up and saw there was still 7 hours to go, I gave up. It is tedious to the extreme with such a mess of story lines as to be incomprehensible and part way through one is left utterly not caring. Not so! No wonder they were unable or unwilling to make this novel the next contender. Having been tempted by the foreknowledge that the Brodie novels had been the basis for a reasonable TV series, I felt it was safe to try this novel. What disappointed you about Started Early, Took My Dog?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |