50 Book Challenge: book five
The Sixth Lamentation by William Brodrick
This is an extraordinarily evocative, dense, complex and readable first novel with a distinctive voice that makes you realise very early on how it was able to find a publisher. You could describe it as a thriller – but it is also a literary novel with large and difficult themes. It deals with the relationship between the Catholic Church and the wartime Nazi regime in France, examines what it means to have Jewish blood in a world that has contained the Holocaust and also what it means to commit yourself to life in a religious community. Despite all this it’s not dry, by any means, but written with flashes of delicious humour which make the underlying tragedy stand out even more starkly. It’s also about people, and families, and the secrets we all keep and the nature of subjective versus objective truth. The plot is simply fiendish and keeps coming at you. Just when you think you’ve finally got to the bottom of it a new twist catches you unaware.
[Buy from Amazon
I picked this up from the three-for-two table in my local branch of Borders and everything about it resonated – from the beautiful blue of the cover to the weight of the paper and the typeface and the fact that a great many of my personal preoccupations were clearly flagged up on the cover (and, once you get into the novel, you even find Sailing By, the Shipping Forecast music, getting a mention). This could be the reason I enjoyed it so much but I think to confine its appeal like that would be doing it a grave disservice. This is a brilliant book, a real find and highly recommended, from an author that is probably destined to become Very Big Indeed. You heard it here first.
Here’s a link that provides all the background a reader could possibly want:
http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/sixth_lamentation.html