False Azure

I acquired my first Carol Shields novel from a special offer on a cereal packet. It was a pretty good deal. I munched my way through several bowls of bran fibre flakes over the course of a week, as per usual, and in return I got a free book. Unless, it was called -- a wonderful title by itself, but one which also connected neatly with the structure of the book. Each chapter title was a single word: despite, instead, yet, unless -- all adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions, the workaday glue words that add subtlety and expressive power to otherwise blustery noun and verb phrases. Since the novel was also largely concerned with the changing state of mind of the main character, as she deals with the problems of her children and her own life, the different chapter title words also helped to set the mood for each chapter - the tone of the internal interrogation that was its subject. It was ingenious. It took me several chapters to spot that something was going on at the level of the chapter headings, and a few more to really work the pattern out. Often, this kind of intellectual device, while being interesting in itself, comes at the expense of my involvement in the story world. But in this case, the sequence of questions and moods raised by the chapter headings added a whole extra level of tension and structure that really helped to keep me keyed in to what was happening to the narrator.

So, when I spotted a copy of another Shield's novel, Larry's Party, in a charity booksale, I made a grab for it, hoping it would turn out to be as much of a bargain as Unless.

Larry's Party is a slightly earlier book than Unless, and it was interesting to chart the similarities and differences, and how Shield's ideas had evolved. The earlier book tracks the life of an ordinary guy, who by a series of accidents (including the accident of his genes) manages to become a world famous authority on and designer of garden mazes. Unlike Unless, this is a book that wears its internal structuring very much on its sleeve. Each chapter covers a significant aspect of Larry's life at a certain age: his work, his love-life, his hair... The first chapter gives us a word picture of a naive, enthusiastic Larry just starting his working life (as a floral designer) and the last with a middle-aged, uncertain Larry throwing a party for his two ex-wives and several friends, and bringing his life full circle.

Larry is quite an engaging character, and I enjoyed the beginning of the book. But after a while, I found myself losing interest. Each chapter would begin with a narrative section describing Larry's attitude to something or other (other men called Larry, in one case, for example) and then we would get some information about how life had changed for Larry since the last vignette -- where he was, who he was with, what new maze projects he had lined up. The problem for me was that I didn't really get any driving sense of where it was all going, and Larry himself was not quite interesting enough to keep me engaged all by himself. I also found the final chapter somewhat anticlimactic. I couldn't connect it in to the rest of the book somehow. The journey through Larry's life prior to this last chapter had been "warts and all", life as a series of barely predictable ups and downs -- a little greyer than most of us would like to admit, with highs that only really become visible as such in hindsight. But the last chapter breaks off with Larry still apparently having a good couple of decades before him at least, and the clear intimation that the good times for Larry are finally rolling in. It's a resolutely sentimental happy ending of the most traditional form, and I still can't figure out where it came from. (Having seen Adaptation, a few more outlandish explanations for the change in style and approach do leap to mind, but I'll do all the search engines who read this blog a favour and keep them to myself.)

Larry's Party did share one other feature with Unless that I enjoyed. It seems that Carol Shields is one of a small number of authors whose writing has the effect of sending me repeatedly back into the world of my own characters -- not afterwards, when I've put the book down, but actually while reading. It's almost as if my brain likes some of the ideas in the writing, and can't wait to try them out on some of my own current problems. It's great when I find an idea that I can usefully steal, but it's a bit frustrating, too, if the book is good and I want to know what happens next.