Jonathan Lee (1) (1981–)

I was hoping this book would be more thrilling, instead it is the type of book that appeals to the readers and reviewers of the New York Times Book Review.
The story is told by three characters 2 of which were not the least bit interesting to me. Only the bomber from the IRA, was at all interesting but I was hoping for something like a Stuart Neville character, not Dan, the bomber in this book, and there wasn't enough of the book from his perspective to make slogging through the other two viewpoints, worth it.
Oh well.… (plus d'informations)

Whilst I could appreciate the quality of the writing, I found this curiously uncompelling. Andrew Haswell Green and his friend, unsuccessful Presidential candidate Samuel Tilden, are both interesting characters - but I found myself wanting to know more about them than the book manages to deliver (ended up resorting to Wikipedia for this - where I found a fair bit of interesting material that it doesn't really explore). I got the impression the author assumed I would know more about them than I actually did (perhaps they are both better known in the US than the UK, which is where I'm from).

There is not much going on in the way of plot - the only things really driving it are (a) your desire to find out what motivated Green's involvement in major public projects like creating New York's Central Park; and (b) the mystery around why Green gets shot in his eighties (NB not a spoiler - this is in the blurb and happens at the start of the book). I didn't find either of these was enough to keep the momentum going over the full length of the novel and the last section was quite hard going. I felt that (a) had already been covered by what we find out about Green's childhood and life as a young adult (although I did find these parts more compelling and others have noted, the author manages to generate a fair bit of sympathy for Green). With (b), there wasn't much mystery to it, ultimately (and I'd guessed what the answer was long before it was confirmed). Another problem with it is that, because we start with him dying in his eighties, we already know quite a lot about what he has become and so any tension over things like "Will Green get back in touch with his close friend Samuel Tilden when he returns from working in Trinidad?" is largely absent - we already know he does, so the only question is how this happens.

Perhaps I shouldn't complain about the lack of such mundane things as plot - after all, this is a literary novel and my mind should surely be on higher things..... As I say, I could appreciate its literary merits, but I was less bowled over by them than some of the reviewers quoted on the book jacket. Did I actually enjoy reading it? Well, if I'm honest, only parts of it - getting all the way to the end felt like quite hard work.… (plus d'informations)