The first draft of the end of the world.
I’ve read Stuart Turton’s other two books and loved them; a Groundhog’s Day murder mystery and a haunted martime thriller. Both books were so unique in their premise. His latest book is no exception to that, but interesting circumstances fail to make up for uneven execution. As someone who enjoyed his previous novels, I think this book felt like a draft. It needed a couple more rounds kneading and proofing.
At times it seemed like Stuart was writing what would happen in a movie, rather a book. Leaps in narration left me confused as to where something was occurring, who was doing what. I can imagine seeing exactly what he wrote in the format of a movie making more sense. The book would flip between first and third person in a confusing manner. Narration was mostly from the point of view of an omnipotent being, but would sometimes for a paragraph be the perspective of a different character. These flips in narration were so sparing that they seemed like they were left in on accident. Like at a previous time Turton changed his mind from multiple first person POV’s to a single omnipotent one. The protagonist’s frequent “aha!” moments often felt unearned. Some characters were overly flat, others seemed to just pop in out of nowhere or vanish. There was an instance where “he” was written when it clearly should have been “her”. The further I read, the more baffling I found chunks of the plot. By the end, I didn’t really care for the overly complex details of the mystery.
While there is a lot to deride, I did love the mysterious setting. The mother-daughter relationship was nice. Figuring out what happened to the world, this island, the elders, was interesting. Turton is great at unique ideas. A great story could be told on that island, with those characters, and that narrator, but the execution just wasn’t what I was expecting.