2008-08-09 I think I must have been reading a different book..

Brilliantly written? Enchanting? Oh, IF ONLY!

It might have been possible to forgive that this is a nasty, sordid, self-indulgent and entirely derivative book if only there were a scrap of quality in the writing; but there is none. An all-too-obvious rehash of children unable to cope with the responsibility of instant adulthood, and almost self-destructing in the face of a sudden ability to self-determine as depicted in William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies', it falls so woefully short that it would be laughable if the state of the modern novel weren't in such tragic decline, precisely due to offerings such as this.

It is carlelessly crafted, inept, even slap-dash - for evidence, see page 128 (Vintage edn.) when the protagonist awakes in the night, in the middle of the hottest summer of the C20th, for some unfathomable reason on the previous evening having thrown all his clothes, bedding, and every scrap of ornament in his room into the depths of the wardrobe - including the lightbulb (I kept hoping this last was a mataphor for something, but no such luck...) He is naked and said to be cold and shivering. One paragraph later, and with no change in physical circumstances, not the opening or closing of a window or door, or (as far as I could tell) the sudden onset of a raging fever, the room is 'hot and airless' and he is 'stifled'. The heat and oppressiveness of the summer of '76 is referred to only in these unsubtle, unimaginative and oblique ways, and the difficulties associated with obtaining water during that summer go entirely unremarked.

There's not a single redeeming feature to any of the major characters, unless you count Julie's wish for the family not to be split up, which actually seems to stem mostly from her own desire not to find herself alone in the world.

We're given no clue why the sisters insist on babying the youngest child, Tom, and dressing him in girls' clothes, nor any hint of what will happen as a result of Derek's discovery of both the body in the cellar and the incest that has begun between Julie and Jack. Even the demolition of surrounding houses - an artless and rudimentary metaphor for the isolated situation of the children - is, at best, sparsely referred to and poorly described, and other such images are also clumsily executed.

I hated it so much because I felt demeaned by having read it, and have lit a fire especially to burn my copy. Waste of money, and - harder to forgive - a waste of my time. Ian McEwan? Emperor's New Clothes.

I'd have given it minus stars, but the system doesn't allow. Now that IS a metaphor for the state of the modern novel.