A delicious study of a truly evil, selfish, piece-of-shit person. I’ve never met a monster such as Maurice Swift, not even in other works of fiction. This might be my closest encounter with an actual psychopath: at first sight, he’s charming. You desperately want him to like you. Then his true colors show – and it will make your blood run cold.
And not just Maurice, but every character in this book is alive. You feel what they feel. Along with Erich, you feel enamoured, charmed, almost as if under a spell. With Gore (Vidal, yes) you feel annoyed. And with Edith… The whole second part of this book was the most uncomfortable, sickening, maddening 100 pages I’ve read in my entire life. It was pure horror. I confess that while soldiering on through it, I couldn’t keep myself from skipping to the end to see if there’s any justice in this world (I won’t tell you.)
Now I wish I was a more literate person and could give you a comparison between this book and “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. But even I can tell you that there’s some nice contrast between Maurice’s extremely good looks and rotten personality. In fact, his beauty serves his rotten personality, it’s his greatest tool and he wields it with killer precision.
And, you’ll forgive me for sounding immodest, but I know that I’m good-looking. Throughout my life, both men and women have made their interest in me obvious. But I can’t control any of that. It was simply the way I was born. Ultimately, it means nothing. I could have a heart of stone for all they know. I could be a psychopath or a sociopath. Not all monsters look like the Elephant Man, and not everyone who looks like the Elephant Man is a monster.
And the writing – wow. It’s been a while since I read anything so beautifully written. It just flows – it’s almost impossible to put down, except sometimes you have to because you’re so enraged or frightened. Not a single description is unnecessary, everything adds either to the plot or the characters. There’s a passage in the book where Erich talks about bad writing and this book is just the complete opposite.
It had many flaws. For a start, it was too long. Over three hundred and fifty pages for a story that could have been told in half that amount. There were an extraordinary number of anachronisms, place names that didn’t exist at that etime, and some of the prose was unnecessarily purple. I had warned him about this in the past. Just say what you have to say, I had told him, and then move on and say something else. Sometimes, after all, the sky is just blue.
(Purple prose only works for Nabokov and the rest of y’all are just phonies.)
I’d never read John Boyne before, but I really think he should win The Prize, in fact, all The Prizes, whatever they may be. I can’t wait to read the rest of his works.
Everyone has secrets. There’s something in all our pasts that we wouldn’t want to be revealed. And that’s where you’ll find your story.
Thoughts On Books and Everything Else 