5/15/2023 0 Comments Book the whisperings within![]() ![]() He wasn’t a good person.”Įqually some of the humour fell a little flat for me – Wallace’s efforts to change his spectral attire which resulted in him wearing a “a striped bikini that left little to the imagination” and later “high heels better suited for an exotic dancer on a stage, making it rain”, for example, was a level of visual comedy that did not quite gel with the rest of the novel.Īlso unlike Scrooge – who visits all of London, and pops out to sea too, in the past, present and future – Wallace becomes bound to a single location: Charon’s Crossing and its owner, Hugo the ferryman. For the life of me, I can’t quite say that’s a terrible thing. ![]() Some moments work well – Wallace’s funeral and his ex-wife’s speech which began His funeral is Chapter Two!ĭespite this, humour permeates the whole novel, making a story exploring death strangely amusing and wry. Unlike Scrooge, though, Wallace dies: to begin with. Perhaps it is only the time of year in which I read it, but those echoes were very clear to me. In fact, there are a lot of echoes of A Christmas Carol here: supernatural beings offering redemption to an isolated unlikeable man with an implicitly unlikeable job – where Scrooge was a money lender of some kind, Wallace was, even more despised, a lawyer. Much to my wife’s disgruntlement as she was trying to sleep at the time! This chapter reminded me of Dickens’ Scrooge, refusing dinner with his nephew, scolding the portly gentlemen collecting for charity and generally terrorising Bob Cratchit – horrific yes, but with a deep satirical humour. His opening chapter which reveals Wallace at his most curmudgeonly, heartlessly sacking an employee and withdrawing a scholarship from her daughter for good measure, was genuinely laugh-out-loud. ![]() Klune excels at humour in the real mundane world, both here and in Cerulean Sea. Klune, author of The House In The Cerulean Sea, with many of the same pleasures – a remote and wonderfully Edenic setting, a found family, a male-male romance, the supernatural, and the courage to touch of some genuine themes. Another deliciously tender and sweet novel from T. ![]()
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