The Greenstone Grail by Amanda Hemingway

A guest review by Marrije Schaake.


The Greenstone Grail could have been a fine book. It's the story of Nathan, who visits other worlds in his dreams. At first they are only dreams, but gradually he goes over to those other places (disappearing from his bed) and begins to influence events in the dream worlds -- and begins taking people back from them to his own world. It's also the story of his mother, Annie, who has lost her husband before Nathan was born, and perhaps even before he was conceived, and of their protector Bartlemy, who cooks the most splendid food and who may have been around for much longer than you'd expect.

There are also dogs named Hoover, water spirits, witches, dragons, ancient prophecies, grails, murder mysteries and English policemen -- and many more ingredients that could have produced a great fantasy novel. The writing is good, too: Amanda Hemingway has a great ear for quirky, believable dialogue and comes up with wonderfully engaging characters. I wish she'd stick to 'said' and just forgot about 'she hissed', 'he amended', 'he insisted' and 'he demanded excitedly' altogether in dialogue attribution, but that may just be my Stephen King indoctrination shining through.

But on the whole, I'm not happy with the book. I'm afraid I found myself arguing with its editing almost from the start. There's so much going on in the story that it's more of a hindrance than a help when we don't stick to a strict chronological order of events. The one crucial event from later on that opens the book is OK, I guess, but from that point on I'd prefer a leisurely, classic buildup -- slowly moving into the village, the school, introducing the neighbours, and then gradually on to how Nathan discovers his special powers and what that does to him.

In some places it's much too long -- dialogue is broken up by lots of description about how people feel about what they've just said, when it's already quite obvious from what they said. The explainy bits about Bartlemy's theory of Nathan's conception and his Destiny are stilted and complicated, and may come too early in the book. And minor characters get too much airtime. For instance, Inspector Pobjoy, who is only there to solve a murder, is described with doubts and backstory and old cases, where I think he should just shut up and be a policeman.

And in other places it's much too short -- interesting events are skipped over, scenes rushed through, complicated happenings pressed into too little space, almost as if the author was forced to cut a lot of material from the manuscript in order to stay under an assigned word count.

Switches in perspective are a problem, too: there are many scenes in which we see events from one person's point of view first, and then suddenly we are in someone else's head, and in the next sentence back in the head of the first character. And whose story is this? Nathan's? Annie's? Bartlemy's? The whole would have been so much stronger if we stuck to Nathan and he was the one central pivot of the story, instead of (for instance) diving too deeply into Annie's love life and her doubts and fears.

It's all quite frustrating, because I get the sense that with a tighter focus on the central narrative this really could have been a very good fantasy novel. I hope Hemingway sharpens her style for parts two and three of this trilogy, because the material is there, the writing and the ideas are good: she just needs a little more ruthlessness with her own text to polish it up right and bring out the strong points.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, for a writer to shape a li
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming t
Read more