Absolution, by Patrick Flanery. Published 2012 by Riverhead Books.
I didn't break my hiatus to talk about The Hunger Games, or Joel
Stein's article about adults reading YA, or even World Book Night. But I
couldn't wait another minute to tell you about what might end up being
my favorite book of 2012, Absolution, the debut novel by American expat writer Patrick Flanery.
The book tells the stories of Clare Wald, an elderly and celebrated
author living in a kind of gilded prison in modern day South Africa,
alone except for her maid. Sam Leroux is a writer and academic who's
come to write Clare's biography, and she doesn't seem happy to have him
there. Their relationship starts off testy and tense but nothing is as
it seems. The story of Clare Wald and Sam Leroux and the secrets, lies
and truths that bind them and tear at them is riveting and beautifully
written; Patrick Flanery may be a debut author but he tackles these
prickly, unpredictable people and writes about difficult social,
political and personal issues like a seasoned veteran.
A biographer faces off against a seemingly unwilling writer; we've seen
this before but in this case it's not so much a battle of wits as a slow
unraveling. The perspective shifts between Clare, Sam, the book that
Clare is writing about her dead daughter Laura, a disappeared activist
who was taking care of the child Sam just before she vanished, and more.
Memories are told, retold, and imagined; sometimes the tellers are
lying, sometimes they just don't know the whole story. The death of one
character, a man named Bernard who looked after the child Sam for a time
after his parents' death, is told four ways, and in the end the truth
eludes us and the characters, too. And that's not all. Laura isn't who
she seems; Clare carries a burden of guilt over the death of her sister
and brother-in-law that may not even be hers to carry, and there are
some things only hinted at that we never know for sure. Absolution is a
lot of things in this book; it's the title of Clare's last book and the
theme of course, the thing that everyone wants and some find more
successfully than others.
So Absolution is really a four-pronged success. Flanery's writing
is mature and elegant; the book reads like Margaret Atwood with its
layers and complexity and craft. The characters are vivid and
three-dimensional, complex and elusive. The plot keeps you turning the
pages; what happened to these people, what's going to happen? The
setting, contemporary South Africa, is rendered as a frightening
dystopia where people live in constant fear of murder and death;
middle-class people live in 24-hour terror of a predatory underclass and
install panic buttons in their showers and bedposts in case of attack. I
wonder if the panic buttons and burglar bars serve as a metaphor for
something inside these people, their vulnerability to guilt and
abandonment, their yearning for love and forgiveness. Sometimes the
measures people take to protect themselves save them; sometimes nothing
can. And the plot clicks along at a very satisfying, page-turning pace. I
can't recommend this book highly enough to readers of literary fiction.
It's a staggering, wonderful and accomplished book. I hope his
subsequent books live up to the promise of his astonishing debut.
Rating: BUY- like, now!
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program.
1 comment:
LOL! It is bad enough that just about everything you blog about ends up on my wish list, but now your archives are doing the same thing! You make this one sound irresistible.
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