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A review by gorecki
Blow Your House Down by Pat Barker
5.0
There are three ways to die in this book: a literal, a lateral, and a cripling one. In the first case you're gone and that's it. In the second, someone else is gone and you're left to drag that loss around. In the third you survive, but at what cost? This is not a new or original thought, something just happens one day and shatters you. There's nothing original about death.
There is, however, something original in the way Pat Barker “does death”: a sense of hovering in the air above her characters, like you're observing things from the top of a viaduct or through Kath's eyes in her picture on the billboard. You zoom in and out, but in the end you're simply helplessly and mutely observing how things collapse without being able to do anything about it. You feel things shifting, you know what is coming, but there's this silent, still-air quality to the writing that just leaves you hovering, looking on, and hoping that it will be over soon, that it will be quick and that there will be some sort of justice. But if it is quick, then it’s even worse: the fragility, the extinguishability of life is so startling.
Blow Your House Down is written in the manner most absolutely brilliant female authors use - without pity or anger, just a observant, factual delivery with incredible attention to detail and the small things surrounding the characters that bring all the punches and sharp intakes of air. A "show-don't-tell" approach you can only find in what I believe to be the greatest lirerary writing. Part 3 of this book contained some of the finest paragraphs on love, relationships and loss that I've read in a long while, and it absolutely broke my bones. What Pat Barker made me feel with just a few pages of this part of the book, other writers have not been able to do across a full novel. I felt my chest expand and billow on my train ride to work - I could half fly, half burst of all the beauty of the pure emotions laid out on the page in front of me.
My eloquence might leaving me with this one, but Pat Barker never will. I'll make sure of it.
There is, however, something original in the way Pat Barker “does death”: a sense of hovering in the air above her characters, like you're observing things from the top of a viaduct or through Kath's eyes in her picture on the billboard. You zoom in and out, but in the end you're simply helplessly and mutely observing how things collapse without being able to do anything about it. You feel things shifting, you know what is coming, but there's this silent, still-air quality to the writing that just leaves you hovering, looking on, and hoping that it will be over soon, that it will be quick and that there will be some sort of justice. But if it is quick, then it’s even worse: the fragility, the extinguishability of life is so startling.
Blow Your House Down is written in the manner most absolutely brilliant female authors use - without pity or anger, just a observant, factual delivery with incredible attention to detail and the small things surrounding the characters that bring all the punches and sharp intakes of air. A "show-don't-tell" approach you can only find in what I believe to be the greatest lirerary writing. Part 3 of this book contained some of the finest paragraphs on love, relationships and loss that I've read in a long while, and it absolutely broke my bones. What Pat Barker made me feel with just a few pages of this part of the book, other writers have not been able to do across a full novel. I felt my chest expand and billow on my train ride to work - I could half fly, half burst of all the beauty of the pure emotions laid out on the page in front of me.
My eloquence might leaving me with this one, but Pat Barker never will. I'll make sure of it.