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A review by gene_poole
Far North by Marcel Theroux
2.0
If the first hundred pages of a three hundred page novel don't intrigue, it's time to move on. Is that your rule, or are you easier to convince? Perhaps because lately I have been reading a load of maximalist heavyweights that Far North, despite its admirers, seems painfully underwritten. What might have been a match for a Cormac McCarthy moral wilderness is only a superficial landscape. Makepeace isn't much of a protagonist, short on insightful reflections and short on the wily attitude a master of the wilderness ought to have.
All her plot situations, at least in the first third, reveal only her flatness. Theroux's character could have been a mysterious traveler or a philosopher of isolation, but she's neither. This novel amounts to another entry in the post-apocalyptic genre, yet sans apocalypse or world-in-collapse scenario (the hippie, Quaker and fundamentalists who found a quasi state in Siberia are standard characters).
Torture yourself with its predecessor, The Road, if you want more anguish, or Riddley Walker if you want more substance.
All her plot situations, at least in the first third, reveal only her flatness. Theroux's character could have been a mysterious traveler or a philosopher of isolation, but she's neither. This novel amounts to another entry in the post-apocalyptic genre, yet sans apocalypse or world-in-collapse scenario (the hippie, Quaker and fundamentalists who found a quasi state in Siberia are standard characters).
Torture yourself with its predecessor, The Road, if you want more anguish, or Riddley Walker if you want more substance.