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A review by readingpanda
The Steady Running of the Hour by Justin Go
2.0
This had everything I should have liked - epigraphs from Wilfred Owen poems, World War I, mountain climbing, Mt. Everest, modern-day travels through European cities - and yet: ugh.
Our main character, Tristan, is a young American with a wanderlust and fascination for history. So it's perfect when he gets a mysterious call from a law firm in the UK telling him he may be the heir to an estate from the 1920s that is going to pass into trust unless he can prove he is a direct descendent. Tristan jets off to London to find out the details, and the basics are that it seems his great-grandmother may not have been the woman he thought it was, but instead her sister, who gave her illegitimate child to this sister to raise. The law firm has been digging, but they are now asking Tristan to try to find any information he can that links him to this woman, so he embarks on a mission that takes him around Europe, researching and asking questions.
Intercut with Tristan's sections are parts telling the story of Imogen (who is theoretically his *real* great-grandmother) and Ashley Walsingham, with whom she had a brief but intense affair. I was unsurprised to read in the author's acknowledgments that one of his influences was Vera Brittain, because I saw direct parallels between her stories in Testament of Youth and Imogen's story. This is where the bits and pieces of 80-year-old information that Tristan finds are fleshed out into a cohesive story. It's a good idea, and pretty well handled for most of the book. Tristan's part is weaker, but I assume that's because there isn't much to Tristan, really. He just follows clues and is something of a spectator in not only Imogen and Ashley's lives, but also his own.
But then it just gradually all goes pear-shaped. Major complaints: Imogen acts in a way that makes no sense at all, for her entire life. Ashley dies needlessly and rather boringly (not a spoiler, of course you go in knowing he's dead and how he died). In the present day, Tristan meets a woman and she also acts in ways that make no sense. Tristan is a cipher, which is sometimes useful but mostly just annoying because he has nothing to add to the story. The ending (by which I mean about the last 30 pages) are absolutely ridiculous. I don't mean the story is unbelievable, although some of it might be. I mean that it's as if a movie director built up to a big confrontation between two characters, then showed them seeing each other from a distance ... approaching ... opening their mouths ... and then cut to a sunny beach 6 months later where one character is talking to someone else and when asked says only: "Oh, that? No big deal." Roll credits.
Our main character, Tristan, is a young American with a wanderlust and fascination for history. So it's perfect when he gets a mysterious call from a law firm in the UK telling him he may be the heir to an estate from the 1920s that is going to pass into trust unless he can prove he is a direct descendent. Tristan jets off to London to find out the details, and the basics are that it seems his great-grandmother may not have been the woman he thought it was, but instead her sister, who gave her illegitimate child to this sister to raise. The law firm has been digging, but they are now asking Tristan to try to find any information he can that links him to this woman, so he embarks on a mission that takes him around Europe, researching and asking questions.
Intercut with Tristan's sections are parts telling the story of Imogen (who is theoretically his *real* great-grandmother) and Ashley Walsingham, with whom she had a brief but intense affair. I was unsurprised to read in the author's acknowledgments that one of his influences was Vera Brittain, because I saw direct parallels between her stories in Testament of Youth and Imogen's story. This is where the bits and pieces of 80-year-old information that Tristan finds are fleshed out into a cohesive story. It's a good idea, and pretty well handled for most of the book. Tristan's part is weaker, but I assume that's because there isn't much to Tristan, really. He just follows clues and is something of a spectator in not only Imogen and Ashley's lives, but also his own.
But then it just gradually all goes pear-shaped. Major complaints: Imogen acts in a way that makes no sense at all, for her entire life. Ashley dies needlessly and rather boringly (not a spoiler, of course you go in knowing he's dead and how he died). In the present day, Tristan meets a woman and she also acts in ways that make no sense. Tristan is a cipher, which is sometimes useful but mostly just annoying because he has nothing to add to the story. The ending (by which I mean about the last 30 pages) are absolutely ridiculous. I don't mean the story is unbelievable, although some of it might be. I mean that it's as if a movie director built up to a big confrontation between two characters, then showed them seeing each other from a distance ... approaching ... opening their mouths ... and then cut to a sunny beach 6 months later where one character is talking to someone else and when asked says only: "Oh, that? No big deal." Roll credits.