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doramar 's review for:
After You'd Gone
by Maggie O'Farrell
This could so easily have been a "loved it", but the structure didn't work for me.
The story starts when our heroine, Alice, steps into traffic and winds up in a coma. The story of Alice and her family is told in a series of flashbacks which bounce around in time: one minute we're seeing a scene from Alice's university days, the next we're back in her grandma's childhood, and then we're watching her parents' courtship or her sisters' home life.
No hint is given as to why we're flying around in time so randomly. The back-cover blurb helpfully explains that this is Alice "listening to conversations around her, and sifting through recollections of her past".
And that's what's irritating, because it isn't!! People are NOT having conversations over her bed. Even if they were, they couldn't be Alice's recollections - unless Alice has somehow acquired God-like powers. The flashbacks include a wealth of information Alice doesn't know, and Alice herself is painted as she's seen by other people, not as she would see herself.
I found that each time we changed from one flashback to another, I was thrown out of the story briefly while I worked out "whose life am I in now?". That jarring could so easily have been avoided with one simple device: the flashbacks could've been presented as the thoughts of the family members, as they each reflect on how they got to this point. We do spend time with each family member as they gather to support Alice, so it would've been an easy addition to the narrative.
The only person for whom that wouldn't work is the grandmother (who's dead), but I didn't feel her past had much relevance to the narrative anyway. As a writer myself, I had a suspicion of, "I've created all this backstory and I'm darn well going to use it, relevant or not".
I did admire the author's use of language to convey Alice's state of mind in several scenes - the first chapter is a standout. That's what kept me reading in spite of the bewildering shifts in time.
The story starts when our heroine, Alice, steps into traffic and winds up in a coma. The story of Alice and her family is told in a series of flashbacks which bounce around in time: one minute we're seeing a scene from Alice's university days, the next we're back in her grandma's childhood, and then we're watching her parents' courtship or her sisters' home life.
No hint is given as to why we're flying around in time so randomly. The back-cover blurb helpfully explains that this is Alice "listening to conversations around her, and sifting through recollections of her past".
And that's what's irritating, because it isn't!! People are NOT having conversations over her bed. Even if they were, they couldn't be Alice's recollections - unless Alice has somehow acquired God-like powers. The flashbacks include a wealth of information Alice doesn't know, and Alice herself is painted as she's seen by other people, not as she would see herself.
I found that each time we changed from one flashback to another, I was thrown out of the story briefly while I worked out "whose life am I in now?". That jarring could so easily have been avoided with one simple device: the flashbacks could've been presented as the thoughts of the family members, as they each reflect on how they got to this point. We do spend time with each family member as they gather to support Alice, so it would've been an easy addition to the narrative.
The only person for whom that wouldn't work is the grandmother (who's dead), but I didn't feel her past had much relevance to the narrative anyway. As a writer myself, I had a suspicion of, "I've created all this backstory and I'm darn well going to use it, relevant or not".
I did admire the author's use of language to convey Alice's state of mind in several scenes - the first chapter is a standout. That's what kept me reading in spite of the bewildering shifts in time.