UNFINISHED READING - Hild by Nicola Griffith

As I've remarked in the past, I don't find giving up on a novel easy. I don't believe any one does. You've forked out £10.99 on a paperback and you want your moneysworth. So when I do, reluctantly, but also with great relief, decide to part company with reading a book, it is significant. You've persevered, but this is one novel you will forever fail to finish. This is as worthy of note, of being reviewed and written about, as a finished novel is. So here is one, admittedly partially read, book review.

I bought Hild by Nicola Griffith when visiting Whitby Abbey in the autumn. I thought it might be interesting and informative. Pieced together from no doubt intensive research, though essentially a fictionalised version of St Hilda's eventful life. What could go wrong with that? 

Nicola Griffiths undoubtedly conjures up a whole Anglo Saxon world, one very different in character to our own. This was necessary preparatory scene setting surely? Intially I was taken in by this period detail, until that detail appeared to be all it had to offer, and it became tiresome. As the saxon terms and names multiplied before your eyes, what was previously endearing, turned into stoical endurance.

Hild at the start of the book is a young child on the cusp of her teenage years. From a noble background, her father has been poisoned in some internecine rivalry, the precise details of which her mother keeps from Hild. She is brought into the court of the royal family, as an oracle and advisor to the King. They are all impressed by her natural affinity as a seer and sage, but this also makes them wary of her youthful creepiness, skill and prescience. So far so good. 

But this state of affairs in the novel becomes interminably stuck, seemingly preparing you for something that forever fails to materialise. At least as far as I got. The novel is over six hundred pages long. I persisted until a tad short of two hundred pages in, before I became so utterly exasperated with waiting on the story developing any sense of momentum. 

It pootles along in its slow to lethargic pace, with the same level of detail obsessed, anal energy. As one set of circumstances merges indistinguishably into another set of circumstances. Its as though a painter faced with capturing on canvas a fresh landscape, turns them all into the same muddy grey mush they painted in the last one. There is little story dynamic, little narrative thrust to speak of. I patiently awaited the dramatic arc of a storyline emerging. But I became very bored, by not a lot happening over far far too many pages. 

One of the reviews quoted on the cover is from Val Mcdermid, who at some point must have said it 'really is a thriller'. Well, all I can say is, that quote must have either been co opted from a review of another novel entirely by Nicola Griffith - or - in a desperate attempt to find some favourable quote to put on the front cover, the publisher edits down a sentence that said 'What one could never say about this novel is that it really is a thriller'- or - our Val did it as a favour to a friend, and fellow lesbian novelist - or - Val read something in it that has completely passed me by. Because nothing, and I mean nothing, about this novel bares even a passing resemblance to a thriller. At least not as far as I read. It did not reach out to me, and it maybe I did respond in kind. Perhaps Hild is not the sort of novel I would ever connect successfully with. Something was not right, and it was either me or it.

But, however, I once worked in publishing, I know what happens when an author comes up with a book that's lacking in interest. They become desperate to salvage something from the mess, at the very least the advance has to be recovered. I bet her publisher rubbed their hands with glee when they conned English Heritage into buying a job lot of the paperback edition, otherwise it was going to be instant remainder shop fodder for this dull book.

CARROT REVIEW - 1/8