A review by cphenly
Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann

1.0

I was disappointed with this book. The concept is clever, and there are some sustained bits in which the view of the world from the perspective of a herd of sheep is imaginative and believable; however, the novel is uneven and ultimately does not hang together. The timeline is disjointed, and I sometimes had trouble following what was happening. I plodded through to the end, but it was something of a chore, and then the ending was unsatisfactory. The sheep characters were the best part, and they were why I bothered finishing the book at all.

Spoiler

Some things I really didn't like: The fact that the main "murder" turns out to be a suicide is something of a cop-out. The fact that the second murder is never solved at all--at least it is solved (the condemnatory videotape is handed over to the police), but we, the readers, never get to know what happened--is most unsatisfactory, since that older murder precipitated all the later events, apparently. There is a highly dramatic scene in which the daughter of the murdered man is, herself, on the verge of being murdered, and then she isn't, and we don't really know why. The implication is that she offers sex in exchange for her life, but she is turned down, and then the narrative draws back and we don't see what happens inside her caravan, but the guy with the gun eventually departs, leaving her alive. The denoument comes when a villager just suddenly stands up in public and announces what she knows. It is not at all clear why she should do this. The sight of a handkerchief that she made for the dead man seems to be the proximate cause, but the psychology makes no sense. Finally (at least the last one I'm going to enumerate!), the sheep, who are supposed to be the detectives here, do not actually solve the crime. What's the point of the gimmick, then?

My judgment: the gimmick, though clever, is not clever enough to warrant your time in reading this novel.