Emotionally Weird

Title: Emotionally Weird
Author: Kate Atkinson
ISBN: 0 312 20324 1
Published: Picador USA
Date: 2000

Book quote:

“You hadn’t kissed him?” (How hard is seems to be to get a kiss off the man of one’s dreams. Has Nora ever been kissed?)



- No, she says regretfully – as you would if you were thirty-eight and had never been kissed, but then I am nearly twenty-one and have been kissed many times and all of them put together aren’t worth an imaginary kiss with Ferdinand.

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Not so much emotionally weird, as metatextually weird. Oh, enjoyable, without a doubt. One can’t help feeling as one reads, however, that the author is slightly off her rocker. If you want to read something and come away with an aching hairline (due to permanently raised eyebrows) and aching sides (due to intermittent convulsive laughter), this is the one for you.
Story. Hm, let’s see. Effie is a 21-year old, living with her mother in a weather-battered deserted holiday home off the coast of Scotland. Her mother’s inscrutable, busy turning into a geological feature, as Effie puts it, and has seemingly been on the run for decades: what from, Effie has no idea. On their island, they tell each other their stories. Effie tells of her life at Dundee University in the early 1970s, amid the expected shambles and drug-induced students and teachers all steeped in their own scandals and obsessions. Her mother (very unwillingly) contributes some short and unembellished accounts of the falling fortunes and exceptionally strange family life of her ancestors, the Stuart-Murrays.

But that’s not the only way the narrative is broken up. The bulk of the text is Effie’s account, in standard print (Times New Roman). Nora (her mother) and text from their conversations while on the island, is in something like a small, cramped Arial Narrow. Effie’s English Literature colleagues at Dundee all write pieces of something, and they all likewise have their fonts. Kevin (a fat geek obsessed with writing a Dungeons and Dragons type epic) writes in something like Matura MT Script. Effie herself writes mysteries and her eternal essay on George Elliot in a small Courier. One of the teachers’ slovenly wives writes a romance novel in a precise and flowing script. You get the drift. (Unfortunately Blogger doesn't t so fonts, I've just realized.)

The scripts and stories are not necessarily distinguished from the ‘real’ story (if such a thing exists): au contraire. In fact, for the first page or so of the book we’re plunged straight into the detective mystery which Effie is writing: which, if moderately intriguing, is deliberately amateurishly written. I did wonder at this choice of style for the very opening paragraph: it takes a confidence bordering on the suicidal.

After that a seeming solidity sets in for a while, with Effie’s account of her life at university. There’s plenty of humour, in all forms. I was reading the opening chapters in a public place and had to close the book and leave due to eruptions of irrepressible, embarrassing laughter. Then we start getting more of the metatextual element raising its head and slapping up around in a disorientating (but not entirely unpleasant) way.

The ‘plot’ is changed, re-written and re-shaped by the desires and suggestions of the characters themselves. Phrases and situations tumble about impossibly, translated from future narrations into later versions of past events, echoes and mirrors and ghosts of textual allusions jump from behind bushes. Supremely unnervingly, even (or perhaps especially) the readers’ own experiences whilst reading, and their anticipated objections and desires, are woven consciously into the crazy fabric. The readers swim in and out, referred to as the ‘poor confused narratees’ through the waves of text.

Amongst this anarchy, what is the ‘real’ story? Ostensibly the whole narrative swings round the fulcrum of Effie trying to find out who her father was, and the story of her family. The conclusions are reached by such an ambiguous route that although she seems satisfied with final revelations (if ‘satisfied’ is the right word) one hardly knows what to believe. It’s no coincidence that the never-ending and seemingly impossible battle to get her George Elliot essay written is concluded ambiguously when she attempts to hand it in but had no idea how it became the mangled mess she pulls out of her bag. The essay is on ‘Middlemarch’, but George Elliot’s ‘Silas Marner’ looms through the pages as another unspoken ghost: another mirror of dubious parentage and unsuspected treasures lost and found, along with its own semi-orphaned wild-haired child, Eppie.


In short, this was a vastly entertaining and pleasing book, but make sure you’re sober when you read it. Otherwise you’ll just put the trippy factor down to whatever substances you’ve been indulging in. Come here for a bona-fide text-induced buzz.

Sliver of Truth

Title: Sliver of Truth
Author: Lisa Unger
ISBN: 978 0 307 33846 4
Published: Crown Publishing
Date: 2007
Book quote:
“The phone number was listed but I couldn’t bring myself to call. What could I say? Hi, I’m Ridley, your second cousin. How’s it going? So, about the night my grandmother was beaten into a coma…”
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Having read and adored Unger’s previous book Beautiful Lies, I plunged into this one with considerable zeal. High expectations are never a good thing.


It’s astonishing how the same thing can taste so different when re-hashed. I loved Beautiful Lies for its forward thrust, the clear writing, the unashamed use of cliffhangers and the genuinely good plot. Sliver of Truth carries on where the Beautiful Lies left off: Ridley Jones is in a now-disintegrating relationship with Jake Jacobsen and there’s something fishy emerging about her Uncle Max’s state of demise. Now, there’s nothing wrong with carrying on where you left off. It’s endlessly hearkening back to the earlier narrative that gets annoying. I read the first 50 pages, thinking ‘surely now we’ll leave all that stuff behind’ – nope. Carries on right to the end. In a way it’s the very theme of the book: not being able to move forward.

This is not to say that the volume isn’t stuffed with action, sex and intrigue. Ridley lurches from one crisis to the next, gets involved in international espionage, gets onto the FBI Wanted list, people drop dead like flies and whenever she manages to take a breath she takes the opportunity to plunge into bed with someone. Theoretically it’s all good stuff.

But there are several problems. First the incessant harping back to the previous book. Second, the endless analysing of motives and feelings. If I submitted something with that degree of mumbling introspective discussion, I’d get my wrists slapped for ignoring ‘show not tell’, and sent back empty–handed with nothing more than a flea in my ear.

Third… it’s plain sloppy at points. Overwriting and careless use of words. (I never thought I’d write this of Unger. She must have been distracted at the time.) Frankly the sort of things that an editor should pick up on anyway. I could tell it wasn’t just me that was being irritated by this: my copy as usual came from the library and I found that someone had gone through it with a neat black biro correcting grammatical errors and word misuse… and they didn’t even bother with things like split infinitives and tautologies.

So why did I pelt through it so quickly, then? I read it slightly despairingly, but to the end, and fast. I didn’t feel like giving up on it. Which leads to the conclusion: all those writing rules are good but if you’ve got a good story with pace to it, you’ll drag the reader behind you, kicking and screaming. Will I read it again? No. Will it put me off other Unger books? No. I’ll just be hoping she’ll be on better form next time.

Beautiful Lies

Title: Beautiful Lies

Author: Lisa Unger
ISBN: 978 1 86325 480 9
Published: Bantam
Date: 2006

Book quote:
“It’s a little-known fat, but parents are like superheroes. With just a few magic words they can make you feel ten feet tall and bulletproof, they can slay the dragons of doubt and worry, they can make problems disappear. But of course the can only do this as long as you’re a child. When you’ve become an adult, become the master of your own universe, they’re not as powerful as they once were. Maybe that’s why so many of us take our time growing up.”


“In the gleaming glass [of trendy East village boutiques] I caught sight of a woman who didn’t know who she was anymore, who didn’t know from where of from whom she came.

I stopped to look at her. She looked real enough, like flesh and blood and bone. But if you reached out to touch her, she faded like a hologram.”
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Ridley Jones is an ‘impossibly hip’ freelance writer in New York. She’s recently split up (amicably) from her childhood friend and almost-betrothed Zachary: Mr Squeaky-Clean. Zack’s a paediatrician like Ridley’s father, and his mother Esme works in the clinic: they’re all one big happy family. Supposedly. Even her recently-deceased “Uncle Max” used to be a “happy” alcoholic before he went through the windscreen of his car one night. He was a very rich bachelor, with lots of toy-girls hanging on, endlessly indulgent of his adoptive niece. The only discordant note seems to be Ace, her brother. He’s a drug addict who’s walked out on the family. Ridley has always idolised him and can’t reconcile herself to his current state.


One day, Ridley accidentally steps into fame when a journalist takes a photo of her saving a small child from getting run over by a truck. With her name all over the papers, one morning her postbox reveals a newspaper clipping with a photo of a child and a note that that simply says: “You are my daughter.”

The story follows Ridley’s investigations into this claim, to the person who sent the note, and unravelling of who exactly her “Uncle Max” was, and what some of his “pet projects” really involved.


As she embarks on this process, someone new moves into the apartment block. As she puts it, “He was hot.” Hot but mysterious. She mistrusts his guarded air, and his Spartan furnishing in his apartment. She’s uneasy about it because there’s nothing there that he couldn’t leave in a second, nothing to tie him down. It takes until the next chapter for us to even learn his name. Jake. “Hot” and “mysterious” don’t go together without accumulating the extra noun, “sex.”

Beautiful Lies concerns itself overwhelmingly with the issue of loss of identity and the need to define oneself. How does one really know “who” one is if all the premises of background and origin are washed away? How much of a character is intrinsic, and how much is defined by those who observe the character? Once again, it’s the Little Lost Girl, only this time it’s identity and sense of self that’s lost, not a body. Ridley passes through a sort of Limbo before she can wear her new identity and learn to trust again.


As ever, there’s the omni-present character of New York in the fabric of the novel. Unger can’t seem to leave it alone, as if it’s an essential part of clothing for words. “Long before I married New York City, I had a passionate love affair with the place. I don’t remember ever wanting to live anywhere else.” Throughout her works, the city itself seems to be an identity: its streets and cafes, the apartment blocks and stairwells act almost like personal moods or thoughts. Venturing outside the city is nothing less than a detachment from self – yet the city, like a personality, conceals its own terrors and dark corners.


The book is a fast, memorable read, stuffed with action, intrigue and suspense – not to mention plenty of spice along the way. Recommended.