It was a good story but I couldn’t get away from the thought that what it needed to make it great was a better editor. It rambled, going on for far too long with parts of the story that didn’t really matter, and not in an elaborating a character’s back story or reveling in the joy of the written word, kind of way. It dragged so much it detracted from my overall impression of the whole book, which makes me wonder what ‘The English Patient’ will be like, as joint winner of the 1992 prize. If it shared the prize, it makes me fear that neither were particularly good, or I suppose the decision may have split the panel and therefore I hope the other judges have better taste than those who backed ‘Scared Hunger’.
Perhaps it was a nod to the subject matter; the slave trade and all the prosperity and horror it brought. I think if the book had stuck to recounting the ship’s journey it would have had more power, as opposed to going off on the slightly odd tangent of how the shipwrecked society lived in an idealistic settlement of all being equal. I just felt the book was trying to do too much by adding in the philosophising ponderings over whether man could live in harmony away from the pressures of society– it was just a bit weird, and also very annoying as all the speech in the penultimate segment of the book was in pidgin English – which was frustrating as it took longer to read and decipher, and therefore exacerbated the sense of it taking forever to plough through. There were great swathes of text I just wanted to cross through and leave out (which obviously I didn’t, as it was a library book!)
I just felt that the writing lacked finesse and I was not invested in the characters, which altogether made this book a bit of a chore to read although not in a hugely repellant way, just resulting in me feeling rather indifferent towards it – on to the next!
