The Book Depository The Unseen by Katherine Webb
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Price: £8.99
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: The Unseen : Paperback : Orion Publishing Co : 9781409117179 : : 24 Nov 2011 : From the author of the acclaimed debut THE LEGACY comes a compelling tale of love, deception and illusion.
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9781409117179
MPN: 9781409117179
GTIN: 9781409117179
Author: Cleopatra
Rating: 5
Review: I loved this book, I readThe Legacy and although I enjoyed reading it, The story has not stayed with me the way I think that The Unseen will. The book starts with a letter Hester Canning, a vicars wife, wrote to her sister in May 1911. The story that follows is centered around the hot, sultry summer of 1911 when Cat Morely is a maid at the rectory. The vicar is taken up with a new spiritualist idea and brings a leader of the movement Robin Durrant to stay in his home. Cat's past life in prison haunts her, Hester is unhappy, unsure of her husband Reverend Albert Canning's interest. In 2011 Leah goes to Belgium at the behest of her ex Ryan to help him identify a dead soldier, one who had some letters sealed within a tin. Leah travels to the sleepy Berkshire town of Colt's Ash to start her research. Both stories past and present are inhabited by well rounded characters, believable, not easily identified as either good or bad but a mixture of the two, so much so that I really cared about so many of them. The historical element seemed to be well researched without it leaping off the page as research which sometimes happens and I didn't see the climax coming. A fantastic read. I am now eagerly awaiting Katherine Webb's next book!
Author: Alexander
Rating: 1
Review: In the Acknowledgements at the back of her novel Katherine Webb praises her "wonderful editor". Unfortunately, it is patently obvious that this particular editor did not do a "wonderful" job. If she actually edited anything that Webb wrote, I shudder to think what the manuscript looked like before it was published. It gives me no pleasure at all to detail the following comments, since I had actually enjoyed her earlier novel "The Legacy", which was much better written and far better constructed. Webb has chosen to tell her story from two different time perspectives, a century apart. Nothing wrong in that; she's used this technique before. However, the first task of any good writer is to make the language of the past as authentic as possible and not allow modern-day usage to interfere with the projected authenticity of an earlier age. I would need too much space to list all the absurdities, but here are some of them: to prep (in the culinary sense) did not come into fashion until the 1920s, aka was not a common abbreviation in Edwardian England, men did not get their legs over in those times (far too many modern idioms sound horribly misplaced in 1911) and on page 377 we have one of many instances where modern usage sounds painfully out of place. Back then there was no political correctness and there were no non-sexist pronouns. So why do we read "must follow their heart" instead of "his heart" or "his or her heart"? Editor, you have not done your job! The next issue I have with this book is what I call sensory overload. Webb gets her modern-day character Leah to walk into a room and see everything, yes everything, every single minor detail, so we are aware of colour, texture, smell and instant conjecture about the past. Webb uses the same technique with her endless descriptions of nature in its various guises, so much so that I was reminded of Disraeli's tart observation on Gladstone: "He is inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." The story moves forward so slowly that this obsession with unnecessary and repetitious detail kills almost every curiosity about how the plot is to develop. Webb has a thing about flies. In the first half of the book we are regaled with constant references to these insects, very much in the style of Daphne du Maurier's "The Birds", and then the author loses interest in them, even though we then enter a period of high summer. Editor, what were you doing? Ah yes, the story. For a good story you need credible and plausible characters who offer the reader more than just a one-dimensional representation. Albert Canning is an appalling caricature of the repressed homosexual who is also clearly deranged. The fact that he carries on being vicar of his parish after a great crime in which he is personally involved and doesn't suffer a total nervous breakdown is beyond comprehension. Here is a cardboard character who is simply being used by Webb for the purposes of telling a third-rate tale. His wife Hester is slightly less repulsive but there are far too many implausibilities in her character. Clueless about sex, but at the same time a proto-nymphomaniac, married to a man of the cloth and living in Edwardian England, she allows her virginity to be taken by a house guest because (page 369) "she is desperate to know". And hey presto, gets herself pregnant first time so Webb has family descendants she can work into her story. The chain-smoking theosophist we are expected to believe is not only bisexual but, despite coming from the best of families, a liar, a cheat and just as deranged as his victim Albert. Not only that but he accepts the fact that he is wrongfully accused of a major crime and refuses to reveal the identity of the real killer, even though he would then get himself off the hook. Oh yes, and then despite being told that he has become a father he refuses to answer any of the letters from the woman he impregnated. Well, the book is ostensibly about "fairies". This is just a very, very, bad book about fairies.
