Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Bad, unpublished writers everywhere will be encouraged in their pursuit of awfulness by the news that M.L. Stedman's book was the subject of a bidding war between two publishers - a fact which reminds me of the joke about the divorcing couple who fought over everything down to the Robbie Williams albums: the loser was forced to keep them. Where to begin with this book? Let's take a few prose samples. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Anyone playing cliché bingo will be ticking off lines like: "[he] was no more similar to him than chalk to cheese." [p. 151] "I'd stay with you through thick and thin, Isabel, *thick and thin*!" [p. 210] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Some passages represent failures of simple sense: After receving a message that her long-lost child might be alive, we are told that the character in question is so incredulous that: "Sleep was out of the question. Hannah was terrified that if she closed her eyes she might wake up." [p. 217] Here are some of the lighthouse keeper's thoughts: "He cannot reconcile the grief he feels at what he has done and the profound relief that runs through him. Two opposing physical forces, they create an inexplicable reaction ..." Yes, you read that right: two abstract nouns are physical. [p. 240] The child in question is at one point described as having: "a translucent pink mouth" [p. 275] Have you ever seen light shining through a little girl's mouth? If so, run: you're in a John Carpenter film. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ And, of course, grotesque sins against style abound: "Around and around like a merry-go-round of possibilities they whirl and jumble ..." [p. 332] Which is like saying: "Lower and lower the bucket was lowered as it descended and sank ..." "Tom feels the stillness of the cell weigh upon him, as dense and as liquid as mercury." [p. 240] After reading this, I put the words 'densest' and 'liquid' into Google: guess which element came up first? So this is how "mesmerising" prose is written these days! But science class is not over yet: "... Lucy, who trusted two strangers, bonding with their hearts like a molecule." [p. 325] "He struggles to make sense of it - all this love, so bent out of shape, refracted, like light through the lens." [p. 241] Get it? You're in the mind of a lighthouse-keeper. And apparently one who can cram a tautology and a pleonasm into a single sentence. To wit: "All this love, so composed of concentric layers, tunicate, like the skins of an onion ..." Or: "All this love, so gap-toothed, crenellated, like the battlements of a castle ... " ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ But let's leave aside the prose for the moment. There is the matter of the plot. A baby washes up on the shore of an island lighthouse maintained by a tragically childless couple. They decide - with some token misgivings tossed at the reader - to claim to everyone they know that the child is their own. The trouble starts here. Somewhere out there a mother missing is her daughter. It's plain that the author started with the idea of a childless couple somehow "finding" a baby in a way in which it could be *claimed* to be their own. But for that to be plausible, they would need isolation from society. For isolation, they would need a lighthouse. And not just any lighthouse perched on the coast, but a very specific lighthouse located on a outcropping of rock one hundred miles from the coast. In short, possibly the only lighthouse on Earth designed to tell passing ships that they're *nowhere near* the coast. This lighthouse is the equivalent of a person who phones you every two minutes with the news that his hand *still* hasn't grown back. We have hit plausibility crater number one. How to get the baby to the lighthouse? Well, a hundred miles away, a man has to jump in a row-boat and go out to sea with it. Why did the man jump in the boat? Well, he was fleeing a mob. Here's plausibility crater number two: a man with a baby in his arms so successfully outruns a baying crowd that he has time to gently place a baby in a boat, unmoor the vessel and row away from them. He decides to run for the docks, which is essentially a cul de sac. And somehow he gets away with it. But further miracles await. The man is soon swept way out to sea. The baby is a goner, right? Wrong. After drifting a hundred miles off the Australian coast, the vessel - presumably unmanned - performs the nautical equivalent of threading a needle: it washes up on the only fragment of land in that vast ocean (which also conveniently has a beach). But if the man survives he'll ruin the plot. So he doesn't survive. Yet somehow the baby does. Plausibility crater number three is quickly followed by crater number four: the baby has made landfall on none other than ... the Island of the Child-Bereft Couple. A moral dilemma has to be one that the reader can at least *conceive* of having to face. Stedman's moral dilemma requires an implausible lighthouse, an implausible ocean voyage and an implausible concatenation of other co-incidences before it can hang together. That's way too much narrative infrastructure: the premise becomes a bungalow with five storeys of scaffolding erected around it. Nobody's fooled. The book does have its unintentionally amusing moments though: even after crossing the finish line, Stedman just keeps stumbling. After completing a novel whose central character loses three children to medically unsupervised births, her Acknowledgements section opens with the words: "This book had many midwives." Concentrate, dear ...