FINISHED READING - Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan

As this novel opens we find ourselves on a boat with a woman who has devilish horns. Its 1910 and she's heading for Edinburgh and 10, Luckenbooth Close. She's desperate, she's a surrogate mother with child, reluctantly going there to deliver it to the brutal Mr Udnam. The Close, is a ramshackle of flats in a dank dark tenement block. It inhabits the place of a central character for the entire novel.

Each Chapter heading has a different year, flat number, persons name and short introductory sentence. You move backwards and forwards in time, gradually progressing forward towards the millennium. Initially I was under a misapprehension that each chapter was a separate discrete character in a different era, and the novel a collage of the life and times of those who'd lived in 10, Luckenbooth Close. A hundred pages or so in I suddenly realised that there were now repeating characters. Oh, there is some sort of story going on? Whilst remaining a collage of tales as well? I became still more baffled when the writer William Burroughs turns up to live temporarily in one of the flats. Was there meant to be an actively meaningful link here ? The zeitgeist of this novel is seriously all over the place,I found it more than a tad confusing. Throwing your attention away with every abrupt change of character, period and continuity.

Jenni Fagan's writing style is undoubtedly fecund and fired up with imaginative possibilities. Rough and robust, with a lot of verbal energy on the page to propel the eye onward. Luckenbooth has visual power a plenty too, that could leave viral traces infecting your imagination. It has this bleak underbelly of corruption, violence, murder of the Victorian melodrama type, tinged with Gothic occultism. However, this all left me feeling disappointed, that it really ought to have been more captivating and absorbing than it was, often infuriatingly opaque rather than intriguing with its cloak of mystery. The episodic flip flopping through time causes you to wonder - where the hell are we going? and do I care anymore? Oddly, I decided quite early on that I didn't, whilst still waiting to be shown the error of my ways.

So quite a disappointing reading experience. Was it worth the effort of hauling oneself through to the end? Sadly, No.

CARROT REVIEW 3/8