The blurb on the back of my copy calls this “a cracking good yarn,” and indeed it is. Shortlisted for the Booker, this novel is about George Edalji, a country lawyer accused of a series of terrible crimes. Justice is in short supply in the rural England of the early 1900s, but George gains an influential friend when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle takes up his case. The plot is intriguing – and it’s based on a true story – but it’s the two protagonists that carry the day. Each is finely drawn, and deeply sympathetic despite their many human flaws.
This is a good airplane book: short, slight, diverting. The subtitle “Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog” is overstating the case; Marley, a slobbery, tail-wagging, galumphing yellow lab, is really just a run-of-the-mill bad boy. If you like dogs, you’ll be amused, but really Grogan has nothing original to say about dogs, life or love.
ETA: On reflection, I think I was too easy on this book, and I think the Grograns were lousy dog owners.
I read and loved most of Stephen King's early novels and then got sidetracked. This one is quintessential King, encompassing all that I enjoy about his books and also all that I find annoying.
Lisey is the widow of a renowned novelist, Scott Landon, who in trying to clean out her husband's studio dredges up suppressed memories of his stories of extreme child abuse and his experience in a parallel universe. The other world is a metaphor for the artistic imagination and also for the place, both safe and dangerous, that abused kids construct for themselves internally. The episodes that take in that other world are the most vivid and interesting in the book.
The story is extremely inventive and suspenseful (oh, I forgot, Lisey is being stalked by a homicidal maniac), and the characters are interesting. What still and I suppose forever turns me off about King's writing is the stilted dialog and the cutesy, look-at-me prose in general. Here, the effect is magnified by King's use of the invented slang used by Scott and Lisey. It got on my smucking nerves.
