![]() ![]() Where Cyril Wong succeeds as a poet, he fails as a novelist-at least in this novel. I read the novel concurrently with Andrew Koh's similarly themed novella, "Glass Cathedral", and maybe it was spoiled by the comparison. In short, the author doesn't quite convince me that I should care about this woman and her guilty conscience. At one point the narrator (on behalf of the author?) scoffs at the saccharine fairytale view of teachers peddled by "Dead Poets Society", but actually Mrs de Souza is a lot like Mr Keating in that film: idealistic, culpable, not quite human. ![]() Mrs de Souza just doesn't come alive, despite attempts to fill in her family background and convey a sense of her physical presence. ![]() The basic problem is that the rash action she took all those years ago, and which she has never ceased to regret, comes across as psychologically implausible it's a novelist's contrivance rather than an intelligible human response to a child crying out for help. The characters feel two-dimensional, and while this is fair enough in the case of Amir (who exists only in his former teacher's tormented recollections and daydreams), it's a problem that the narrator, too, isn't interesting enough to sustain the reader's attention or arouse much sympathy. Wong is a decent stylist but that's not quite enough to save the book for me. ![]()
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