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A review by alesia_charles
The Watch by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
1.0
The author writes very well, and the first chapter was absorbing and deeply affecting.
But then it switched points of view, and after the book sat around for six weeks waiting for me to pick it up again, back to the public library it went.
If it had been set up so that the points of view (crippled and angry Afghani woman on one side, American soldiers on the other) would swap back and forth through the book - then I might've stayed interested. But the switch was permanent - I checked.
I liked the Antigone parallel in theory. I particularly dislike the affectation of not using quotation marks for dialogue. It worked for me during the first chapter, because the point of view character is uneducated and relatively unsophisticated and deeply emotional; continuing it with the soldiers' point of view did not work for me at all.
I also didn't like that the book was going spend just one chapter on "Antigone's" point of view and then the whole rest of a full-length novel on the men arguing about what to do. We're talking 304 hardcover pages here.
I get that Roy-Bhattacharya intended to explore the impact of the moral dilemma on the soldiers (as Sophocles explored its impact on Creon). I even get that the swapping between the woman's point of view and the soldiers' might have diluted the former's - though I think he could've handled it well enough to avoid that. It just turns out that the author didn't write the book I wanted to read: I wanted more of her point of view, more interaction.
Antigone was an active participant in her story, as Sophocles told it. In this version, though, she sits outside the fort the whole time, able to communicate only through an interpreter. Then she disappears from direct involvement in the story. Is everything propelled by her presence? Sure. Does she really get to be anything but a symbol, a cipher, a threat? No. She gets a brief period of real personhood (which only she and the reader really perceive) and then - poof.
I'm not interested. I wanted to see a good, solid argument and interactions between actual characters, not between a set of (male) characters and a (female) cipher. Very disappointing.
But then it switched points of view, and after the book sat around for six weeks waiting for me to pick it up again, back to the public library it went.
If it had been set up so that the points of view (crippled and angry Afghani woman on one side, American soldiers on the other) would swap back and forth through the book - then I might've stayed interested. But the switch was permanent - I checked.
I liked the Antigone parallel in theory. I particularly dislike the affectation of not using quotation marks for dialogue. It worked for me during the first chapter, because the point of view character is uneducated and relatively unsophisticated and deeply emotional; continuing it with the soldiers' point of view did not work for me at all.
I also didn't like that the book was going spend just one chapter on "Antigone's" point of view and then the whole rest of a full-length novel on the men arguing about what to do. We're talking 304 hardcover pages here.
I get that Roy-Bhattacharya intended to explore the impact of the moral dilemma on the soldiers (as Sophocles explored its impact on Creon). I even get that the swapping between the woman's point of view and the soldiers' might have diluted the former's - though I think he could've handled it well enough to avoid that. It just turns out that the author didn't write the book I wanted to read: I wanted more of her point of view, more interaction.
Antigone was an active participant in her story, as Sophocles told it. In this version, though, she sits outside the fort the whole time, able to communicate only through an interpreter. Then she disappears from direct involvement in the story. Is everything propelled by her presence? Sure. Does she really get to be anything but a symbol, a cipher, a threat? No. She gets a brief period of real personhood (which only she and the reader really perceive) and then - poof.
I'm not interested. I wanted to see a good, solid argument and interactions between actual characters, not between a set of (male) characters and a (female) cipher. Very disappointing.