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This is a startling and intriguing book.
The framework is a familiar one – to tell the story of a group of
friends as a series of overlapping tableaux, changing viewpoints with
each new chapter. Previous examples I’ve read have been
promising at the start, but became tedious or repetitive at some point.
The Sand in the Painting gave completely the opposite
experience. I was a bit dubious when I saw what was ahead, and a
bit impatient when I saw that chapter 3 would reiterate things I’d
seen in chapters 1 and 2 – but by then I’d been drawn in. My
doubts forgotten, I was hooked and the book maintained its grip right to
the last page.
‘What was she thinking of?’ we so often cry, and, ‘What on earth
do they talk about when they’re together?!’ On its lighter level,
this book exploits that predatory curiosity: The reader finishes each
chapter at a gallop, burning with the desire to open the next and find
out what the other one was really thinking, and what he
said to her when they left the room.
But there is more. Author Catherine Edmunds has presented complex,
believable characters in a well-realized setting and created – what?
– something between an intelligent romance and a suspense novel.
I found myself continually having to change my mind about which
characters I was in sympathy with, because I met each one as you do in
life: First as someone on the edge throwing in comments, then as
the friend, spouse or colleague of someone I cared about – and then
suddenly as themselves, with all their motivations and perceptions laid
out before me. It’s an object lesson in empathy.
The Sand in the Painting, rather like the seed in the
oyster shell, is the irritation which stimulates greatness and terror,
and the factor which makes human affairs so unpredictable and so
creative. With impressive craftsmanship and control, Edmunds
develops small actions and reactions between her characters and
consistently produces surprising and yet believable revelations right up
to the final pages. I approached the last page feeling – briefly
– that a trite happy ending might be coming along. Well, as
Richard Bach once pointed out, if you’re still alive, your story
can’t be finished. And this book demonstrates that. We get
a happy ending – but one in which the snags and seeds of future
challenges leave the reader busily writing the sequel even as the book
is put down.
Have you ever walked out of a conversation smugly sure that you
understand everyone present better than they understand themselves?
Have you ever wisely and capably treated someone in an emotional state
or with a mental condition in ‘the right way’? Have you ever
washed your hands of a clichéd situation, knowing exactly how it will
come out? Well, I guarantee you won’t get through this novel
without kicking yourself more than once for your blindness and
assumptions.
What struck me as the most original feature of this book was the way the
complexity of the social interactions it portrays builds up
progressively without ever withdrawing to an impersonal, gods-eye-view.
The result is that towards the end, when all the friends you now know so
well converge in one place, you are so aware of the tender wounds in
each of their beings, so mindful of what self-obsessed little despots
human beings can be, that the rash chanciness of a roomful of friends
hoping to survive a coffee and a chat is terrifying.
If you are interested in people, if you want to understand human
communication and perception, I wholeheartedly recommend this book.
But don’t read it on the train. If you get past the first
chapter you will almost certainly miss your stop and have to finish the
book in the terminus. |
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