Gertie MacDowell reviewed My Father's House by Joseph O'Connor
A mundane fiction of thrilling true life events
1 star
I tend not to like books I feel I could have done a better job writing myself and 'My Father's House' is no exception.
What it amounts to is a good third draft in need of a hard pruning. Too often the author's descriptions grasp for quantity over quantity; using similes as if each came with a monetary commission. We are treated to superfluous descriptions of places and actions so much so that the first half of the book is nothing but.
Despite this, the characters wind up feeling half-baked even though they are allocated copious pages to tell their story. At a point in the middle it seems they've been rounded out enough that the reader can comprehend them, but then they unravel again by the end into little more than pastiche cliches.
The plot itself was also rather doddering. The main action doesn't begin until well into the …
I tend not to like books I feel I could have done a better job writing myself and 'My Father's House' is no exception.
What it amounts to is a good third draft in need of a hard pruning. Too often the author's descriptions grasp for quantity over quantity; using similes as if each came with a monetary commission. We are treated to superfluous descriptions of places and actions so much so that the first half of the book is nothing but.
Despite this, the characters wind up feeling half-baked even though they are allocated copious pages to tell their story. At a point in the middle it seems they've been rounded out enough that the reader can comprehend them, but then they unravel again by the end into little more than pastiche cliches.
The plot itself was also rather doddering. The main action doesn't begin until well into the book and even then it is not told consecutively! It is interspersed with more character statements. It became hard to know if the book was about the whole 'Escape Line' itself or just this one operation; as if the author himself couldn't decide.
Most jarring of all though, is that the book presents what it postulates as historical material but while reading, it is hard not to wince at language and attitudes more at home in the 21st century than 1940s wartime, and especially the Vatican City. The author also attempts to showcase the writing of multiple characters but can't quite pull it off. They all appear too similar in style and tone for all the diversity the characters are supposed to portray. It jolted me completely out of the story early on and once I was out, I was out. The rest of the book was merely reading words.
Overall, I felt the book was taking a far more mundane (yet no less interesting true story) and stretching out into something contemporary readers might identify better with by riffing off something Dan Brown would write. It's a cat-and-mouse tale when it should have been a political thriller. One star for the source material.