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A review by avalon111
The Day of the Dolphin by Robert Merle
3.0
Well this was a revelation.
It had sat on my bookshelves for (again) likely four decades, but can't remember it at all.
And rarely, this is novel where the movie adaptation is better than the source material. Quite unlike say, the Harry Potter novels, which are consistently better than the movies, which themselves are nonetheless very good.
TDotD is pretty good until chapter 8. The stream-of-consciousness-like writing is a tad irritating, particularly where dialogue is included. Plus there are quite a few run-on sentences that never seen to stop. If you read such pages aloud you'd asphyxiate yourself! Regardless, for a thriller, and it certainly is a thriller, it is pretty good. Until, as mentioned, you get to chapter 8.
Which is when the wheels fall off and the novel goes into the well, territory of the unbelievable. A lengthy Press Conference scene is so out-of-kilter with what has gone before, that its like Robert Merle had written up to that point, then run-out-of-steam and returned to his draft months later, having lost the thread of what he'd been writing.
Because from Chapter 8 the novel drops right off the deep end, into a long speculative and faintly absurd narrative that recovers only just before the end. It makes it worthwhile persisting with, but you might want to save yourself the bother; Buck Henry, who wrote the screenplay for Mike Nichols 1973 adaptation, removed all of the gumpf and certainly all of the sheer unbelievability (from chapter 8 onwards) of the novel and delivered the story that Merle would have perhaps found too sensible. Watch the movie. It's way better.
It had sat on my bookshelves for (again) likely four decades, but can't remember it at all.
And rarely, this is novel where the movie adaptation is better than the source material. Quite unlike say, the Harry Potter novels, which are consistently better than the movies, which themselves are nonetheless very good.
TDotD is pretty good until chapter 8. The stream-of-consciousness-like writing is a tad irritating, particularly where dialogue is included. Plus there are quite a few run-on sentences that never seen to stop. If you read such pages aloud you'd asphyxiate yourself! Regardless, for a thriller, and it certainly is a thriller, it is pretty good. Until, as mentioned, you get to chapter 8.
Which is when the wheels fall off and the novel goes into the well, territory of the unbelievable. A lengthy Press Conference scene is so out-of-kilter with what has gone before, that its like Robert Merle had written up to that point, then run-out-of-steam and returned to his draft months later, having lost the thread of what he'd been writing.
Because from Chapter 8 the novel drops right off the deep end, into a long speculative and faintly absurd narrative that recovers only just before the end. It makes it worthwhile persisting with, but you might want to save yourself the bother; Buck Henry, who wrote the screenplay for Mike Nichols 1973 adaptation, removed all of the gumpf and certainly all of the sheer unbelievability (from chapter 8 onwards) of the novel and delivered the story that Merle would have perhaps found too sensible. Watch the movie. It's way better.