At the beginning, I wondered if I would give up on this book. It starts with young Roderick Macrae's account of the three murders in the Scottish Highlands in 1869. These early descriptions of his life were nothing to do with the awful crimes. But I'm glad I persevered. There is a section when he is visited in prison by his lawyer and a psychologist that is brilliant. And I raced through the last half of this original novel. I was never sure about the reliability of Roderick's narration and this is questioned near the end. The descriptions of the remote village of Culduie and it's surroundings are excellent. Well worth sticking with.
My seventh Penelope Fitzgerald. I loved "Offshore", "The Gate of Angels" and "The Bookshop", less so "The Beginning of Spring", "The Blue Flower", "at Freddies" and now "Innocence". What I now realise is that there are times when I just wished for more plot and this latest read was such a story. The writing is always wittily contradictory, almost intellectual with twists of the language. Try these:
"she was an alert and reckless driver, but suffered from attacks of conscience, of no use at all on the streets of Florence"
"Curious that advice is just as irritating when it's wrong as when it's right"
"The wash of tourists and visitors was beginning to recede, leaving behind it the rich fertilizing silt of currency"
And then more elusive: "Hard work and opportunism are the secrets of biological success".
Again a short novel, so it did not outstay it's welcome.
"she was an alert and reckless driver, but suffered from attacks of conscience, of no use at all on the streets of Florence"
"Curious that advice is just as irritating when it's wrong as when it's right"
"The wash of tourists and visitors was beginning to recede, leaving behind it the rich fertilizing silt of currency"
And then more elusive: "Hard work and opportunism are the secrets of biological success".
Again a short novel, so it did not outstay it's welcome.
It was all going so well, typically brilliant Ishiguro, on it's way to a rare five stars. I loved the formal conversational first person narrative. (Although some readers hated that). "The sight of Sarah Hemmings did of course rather surprise me, but I'm sure nothing unusual showed on my face. I had set my features to convey annoyance, and I suppose that is what she saw." But then the last part was straight out of a thriller, at complete odds at what went before.
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