![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kestrell_The School of Night_ by louis Bayard (Henry Holt & Co., 2011)
While my narrative fetish for books about book collectors is not quite as obsessive as my narrative fetish for books about books, I'm still often a sucker for novels which feature book geeks as main characters. Which is, perhaps, where _The School of Night_ goes awry--there's a lot of flashy theorizing from the main characters about Elizabethan writers, but I never felt that these characters really liked books. I also felt that most of the intellectual theorizing occurs at the undergraduate level, which is also the emotional maturity level of the characters. So, the characters are petty, the supposedly intellectual theories are superficial, and the second storyline set in the Elizabethan timeline is pretty dull (though I'm willing to award points to the author for making both Elizabethan politics and alchemy boring).
The two previous Bayard books which I have read, _Mr. Timothy_, which features a grownup Tiny Tim, and _The Black Tower_, which is a sort of Sherlock Holmes meets _The Man in the Iron Mask_, were both solid mysteries, but perhaps contemporary mysteries are not Bayard's strong suit. Also, Bayard indulges in an exhuberance of ellipses in _The School of Night_, at least one and often two or three per page, which began to really annoy me about halfway through the book, even more than the fact that the forty-something academics in this book often speak in twenty-something snark.
Publishers Weekly described this novel as a "superb intellectual thriller," which only goes to show that I really need to listen to my own advice and learn to ignore PW reviews, which seem to be more hyperbolic puff than critical evaluations (the exception is PW's genre reviewers and the Genreville blog, which imo do more active critical reviewing).
I would say that this book might make a decent beach book for someone who likes historical mysteries, and it will be in my go-away pile at the Book Swap and Tea Party I will be hosting on Sat. April 23.
While my narrative fetish for books about book collectors is not quite as obsessive as my narrative fetish for books about books, I'm still often a sucker for novels which feature book geeks as main characters. Which is, perhaps, where _The School of Night_ goes awry--there's a lot of flashy theorizing from the main characters about Elizabethan writers, but I never felt that these characters really liked books. I also felt that most of the intellectual theorizing occurs at the undergraduate level, which is also the emotional maturity level of the characters. So, the characters are petty, the supposedly intellectual theories are superficial, and the second storyline set in the Elizabethan timeline is pretty dull (though I'm willing to award points to the author for making both Elizabethan politics and alchemy boring).
The two previous Bayard books which I have read, _Mr. Timothy_, which features a grownup Tiny Tim, and _The Black Tower_, which is a sort of Sherlock Holmes meets _The Man in the Iron Mask_, were both solid mysteries, but perhaps contemporary mysteries are not Bayard's strong suit. Also, Bayard indulges in an exhuberance of ellipses in _The School of Night_, at least one and often two or three per page, which began to really annoy me about halfway through the book, even more than the fact that the forty-something academics in this book often speak in twenty-something snark.
Publishers Weekly described this novel as a "superb intellectual thriller," which only goes to show that I really need to listen to my own advice and learn to ignore PW reviews, which seem to be more hyperbolic puff than critical evaluations (the exception is PW's genre reviewers and the Genreville blog, which imo do more active critical reviewing).
I would say that this book might make a decent beach book for someone who likes historical mysteries, and it will be in my go-away pile at the Book Swap and Tea Party I will be hosting on Sat. April 23.
