LONG LANKIN – LINDSEY BARRACLOUGH

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Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough
My rating: 3/5 cats

this book is an anomaly.

most books with multiple POV’s, where the perspective changes as much as three times per page, will be fast-paced. the benefits of this style, for a writer, are that you can keep the reader interested and frustrated all at once. you want to keep them guessing, you want to make them scream, “no, get back to that character, i want to know what is happening!” and it fragments the narrative so you can show a ton of things happening at once, and usually, the result is a book with the pacing of a video game.

but this is one of the slowest-paced books i have ever read. and that’s not a criticism, necessarily, i love giant densely-written books, and i think ordinarily the slower-paced a horror novel is, the more effective it is; the better-defined the atmosphere is, the creepier it is when the supernatural elements begin to intrude.

but this one was so detailed, that i spent a lot of time wondering why that was. had it taken place in a victorian setting, the attention to detail would have made more sense; some sort of YA woman in white that goes on for ages with the endless descriptions and backstories that never find anything to attach themselves to; a tip of the hat to the conventions of the writing of that time. but this is postwar england, and while i really did appreciate her details and her description and the mood it created, there were many times that i thought, “why did she just spend three sentences on that?” usually, when you are reading a mystery novel, your mind will automatically register a detail that seems superfluous or otherwise odd, and you file it away because you assume that there will be a big reveal that will make its seeming incongruity make sense. but in this case, there was never any payoff for the small details, they were just there to give thickness-without-depth.

for example, here is an entire POV “chapter” which adds nothing to the story:

ROGER

I’ve no idea how old Glebe House is, but it’s not as old as Mrs. Eastfield’s. Mum says the whole house used to be the rectory, but it’s so enormous, it’s now divided into two. Father Mansell, the rector, and his wife live in one half, the bit round the back, and the grand bit at the front with the great big shiny black door is where Mr. Treasure and his family live.

Mr. Treasure’s the headmaster of Lokswood School on the other side of Daneflete. Mum says the boys’ parents pay a lot of money for them to go there—that’s why the Treasures can live in that big house and have a gardener with a petrol lawn mower you can ride on.

Father Mansell and Mrs. Mansell are really quiet. They have grown-up children who have left home and have families of their own. I wonder what it’s like living joined onto the Treasures. I wonder if they can hear them being smart and posh on the other side of the parlour wall.

and that’s it. and then it switches to cora’s POV, and we move on. the treasures are never really major characters,  father mansell is a useful character, but not what i would call a focal point, and the information about the rectory being split into two is brought up at least two more times, so without this diversion, we would still have this information.

and why this small domestic scene? i am going to put it in a spoiler thingie because it is really long, which is kind of my point, so you can read it or not.

View Spoiler » “Mum! MUM!” shrieked Dennis. “DAD! It’s the ice-cream man!”

He went running into the house, then shot out again.

“Roger! Mum’s given me half a crown! Come on!”

We all got up and rushed down Fieldpath Road to where the ice-cream van had stopped outside Mrs. Wickerby’s.

“Mum and Dad want wafers,”Dennis said, jumping up and down as we waited behind some other children. At last we got our cornets and raced back to the house. Dennis was running so fast that, as he whizzed up the veranda steps with the wafer for his mum in one hand and the change and his cornet in the other, he tripped. His ice cream shot out of its cone and landed with the money in a heap on the wooden floor. A penny rolled round and round, then slipped through a crack between the planks. There was silence, then suddenly Dennis started screaming.

Mrs. Jotman came rushing out, thinking his leg must have come off at the very least.

“Oh, dear,” she said, picking him up from where he was thrashing about on the veranda floor. “Here, have my wafer instead.”

“Don’t – don’t like wafers!” he yelled. “Want my cornet!”

We could hear the ice-cream van going off down the lane towards North Fairing. Everyone was eating their cornet really fast so they wouldn’t have to share it with Dennis. Mrs. Jotman disappeared into the house and came back with a spoon. She picked up his empty cone and spooned the ice cream from her wafer into it for him.

“‘S not the same,” he said sniffing.

“I’ll have it, then,” she said, and pretended to go for a lick. He snatched it off her and started to eat it, and she went back into the house for a cloth, biting bits off the empty wafers.

« Hide Spoiler

so i’m not knocking her writing here, because she has a really striking tone, and an ability to write characters that are winning and brave (sometimes a little too brave), but i can’t help but wonder if maybe there are two (or more) books in this one. she spends an awful lot of time building up the character of roger’s long-suffering and kind-hearted mother in this and other scenes. and it is beautifully written. i would love to read more of her story. just not here.

but this sounds like all i am doing is complaining, but it is meant not as a complaint, but as an observation of something that struck me as odd when i was reading it.

i was never scared, reading this, but with me, that is not unusual ):  however, i did nearly throw up during the scene at gussie’s house, which made me over-the-moon happy. any time i can get a real, physical reaction to a book, it thrills me. and it was so, so gross, oh my god. there, her enviable powers of description won me over entirely.

definitely a writer i will look for in the future, because she is very talented and seems to have a lot of ideas, but this one wasn’t a slam-dunk for me.

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