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A review by bucket
Enon by Paul Harding
3.0
"And yet. Wouldn't my sorrows have been the greater if Kate had never been at all? Wouldn't they? Wasn't it the case that her short and happy life was the greatest joy in my own?"
I had high expectations for this book, and I'm sorry to say that I came away a little disappointed. The author's first novel, Tinkers, blew me away with its beauty, whimsy, and ebb-and-flow style. Enon lacks most of the beauty (in part due to it's grief-stricken protagonist whose perspective we never leave) and some of the whimsy (though a memory of visiting a grandfather clock and an orrery, a memory of being outside at night with friends, and memories of feeding birds with Kate have their magic).
The ebb-and-flow style is here, in full force. However, it just doesn't work as well. There are a few potential reasons for this. First, our narrator is living in a drug-induced stupor. Second, we are mired very deeply in his perspective, and his alone. His thoughts and recollections are non-linear, but the "present" of the story IS linear (meaning that we read his thoughts in the order that he thinks them).
This leads to the ebbing-and-flowing being something like stream of consciousness, but not quite there - it feels half-baked. The long sentences and adding-nuance clauses are there, but the ideas presented often border on nonsensical and therefore don't give much illumination. For example:
"The wind on the serrated edge of the hurricane spun for the moment in strict tempo, and I thought that if the storm stopped traveling, and just remained, hung high above the village, spinning in place, and if it were fed the same diet of pressure and water and temperature, at a constant rate, it would be like a great, single-geared clock turning above us in the sky. We could set our watches to it. We might learn to make little hurricanes ourselves, to wear on our wrists to tell time."
The obsession with clocks and gears and time, that made so much sense in Tinkers, makes little here. What is the point of thinking of a hurricane as a clock and imagining little hurricane wrist watches? What does this illuminate?
Enon still has its moments of power.
For example, the moment Charlie realizes his errors: "I realized that what I had been doing since Kate's death was nothing short of violence. It was not grieving or healing or even mourning, but deliberate, enthralled persistence in the violence of her death, a willful preservation of the violence imparted to her and to our family by that car battering her."
And this little gem about time: "Not so much as a leaf on a tree rustled. The yard seemed timeless, and it struck me that the wind moving the trees and the grass and the clouds was what usually gave the sense that time was still moving, that the world was still moving, that the wind was a mechanism something like a clock. Or the trees and the clouds were the clock and the wind the power released from some immense solar springs uncoiling in space."
There is also a recurring idea that below the ground under Enon is everything and everyone that has been part of the area throughout history and prehistory - that all who no longer live are there jumbled up together. In memories, Charlie fears accidentally falling into that world and never climbing out. In the present, he longs for access or at least for his daughter to be able to move between that world and his. I wonder if I would have enjoyed the book more if Harding had let go of the machine/gear/clock obsession and instead focused on this idea of mixed-up time.
Finally, I love this random sentence, as a description of the joy of reading:
"What I loved most was how the contents of each batch of books mixed up with one another in my mind to make ideas and images and thoughts I'd never have imagined possible."
Themes: grief, clocks/machines/gears, time (and it's physical manifestations), addiction
I had high expectations for this book, and I'm sorry to say that I came away a little disappointed. The author's first novel, Tinkers, blew me away with its beauty, whimsy, and ebb-and-flow style. Enon lacks most of the beauty (in part due to it's grief-stricken protagonist whose perspective we never leave) and some of the whimsy (though a memory of visiting a grandfather clock and an orrery, a memory of being outside at night with friends, and memories of feeding birds with Kate have their magic).
The ebb-and-flow style is here, in full force. However, it just doesn't work as well. There are a few potential reasons for this. First, our narrator is living in a drug-induced stupor. Second, we are mired very deeply in his perspective, and his alone. His thoughts and recollections are non-linear, but the "present" of the story IS linear (meaning that we read his thoughts in the order that he thinks them).
This leads to the ebbing-and-flowing being something like stream of consciousness, but not quite there - it feels half-baked. The long sentences and adding-nuance clauses are there, but the ideas presented often border on nonsensical and therefore don't give much illumination. For example:
"The wind on the serrated edge of the hurricane spun for the moment in strict tempo, and I thought that if the storm stopped traveling, and just remained, hung high above the village, spinning in place, and if it were fed the same diet of pressure and water and temperature, at a constant rate, it would be like a great, single-geared clock turning above us in the sky. We could set our watches to it. We might learn to make little hurricanes ourselves, to wear on our wrists to tell time."
The obsession with clocks and gears and time, that made so much sense in Tinkers, makes little here. What is the point of thinking of a hurricane as a clock and imagining little hurricane wrist watches? What does this illuminate?
Enon still has its moments of power.
For example, the moment Charlie realizes his errors: "I realized that what I had been doing since Kate's death was nothing short of violence. It was not grieving or healing or even mourning, but deliberate, enthralled persistence in the violence of her death, a willful preservation of the violence imparted to her and to our family by that car battering her."
And this little gem about time: "Not so much as a leaf on a tree rustled. The yard seemed timeless, and it struck me that the wind moving the trees and the grass and the clouds was what usually gave the sense that time was still moving, that the world was still moving, that the wind was a mechanism something like a clock. Or the trees and the clouds were the clock and the wind the power released from some immense solar springs uncoiling in space."
There is also a recurring idea that below the ground under Enon is everything and everyone that has been part of the area throughout history and prehistory - that all who no longer live are there jumbled up together. In memories, Charlie fears accidentally falling into that world and never climbing out. In the present, he longs for access or at least for his daughter to be able to move between that world and his. I wonder if I would have enjoyed the book more if Harding had let go of the machine/gear/clock obsession and instead focused on this idea of mixed-up time.
Finally, I love this random sentence, as a description of the joy of reading:
"What I loved most was how the contents of each batch of books mixed up with one another in my mind to make ideas and images and thoughts I'd never have imagined possible."
Themes: grief, clocks/machines/gears, time (and it's physical manifestations), addiction