Post by Deleted on Jul 18, 2020 19:53:59 GMT
This was an exquisite piece of work. A proper good-old yarn that encompasses a fictional life from start to end.
I'd heard about this book a while back but never got round to reading it until now.
It felt so real that about halfway through I had to google G.B. Edwards to see if this was literally just his life story. But no, he left Guernsey, lived in London, and had a very different existence. Big things were apparently expected of him when he was Young but it never materialised. Then, just before he died, he wrote this.
What I loved was that Ebenezer Le Page felt like a real person; cantankerous, funny and opinionated. Most novels are narrated by personality-lacking robots who gaze into the middle distance and ponder the human condition. Yawn. This was sweeping and epic and full of life. A real life. And funny.
I so desperately wanted him to get together with Liza Quéripel but it just doesn't happen. Because that's just not how life works. I felt for him when his best friend Jim died in the First World war. When Tabitha lost her husband. When Raymond lost his faith. When the sisters Prissy and Hettie fell out and made up again and again. When Neville Falla vandalised his property. When he befriended one Nazi but killed another. And when he told us about the book he was writing.
This book was an absolute joy. And to learn it was yet another book which publishers rejected reminds me how incompetent most of them are. It solely takes places on the island of Guernsey and covers such a fascinating era; the First World war, the German occupation, the technological changes. An absolute masterpiece.
"The older I get and the more I learn, the more I know I don't know nothing, me."
I'd heard about this book a while back but never got round to reading it until now.
It felt so real that about halfway through I had to google G.B. Edwards to see if this was literally just his life story. But no, he left Guernsey, lived in London, and had a very different existence. Big things were apparently expected of him when he was Young but it never materialised. Then, just before he died, he wrote this.
What I loved was that Ebenezer Le Page felt like a real person; cantankerous, funny and opinionated. Most novels are narrated by personality-lacking robots who gaze into the middle distance and ponder the human condition. Yawn. This was sweeping and epic and full of life. A real life. And funny.
I so desperately wanted him to get together with Liza Quéripel but it just doesn't happen. Because that's just not how life works. I felt for him when his best friend Jim died in the First World war. When Tabitha lost her husband. When Raymond lost his faith. When the sisters Prissy and Hettie fell out and made up again and again. When Neville Falla vandalised his property. When he befriended one Nazi but killed another. And when he told us about the book he was writing.
This book was an absolute joy. And to learn it was yet another book which publishers rejected reminds me how incompetent most of them are. It solely takes places on the island of Guernsey and covers such a fascinating era; the First World war, the German occupation, the technological changes. An absolute masterpiece.
"The older I get and the more I learn, the more I know I don't know nothing, me."