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Shona Parker's Reviews > The Hunting Party
The Hunting Party
by
by
There are fleeting moments of good writing here but sadly they are extremely rare nuggets between layers of cliches and predictable dross.
The characters are two dimensional tropes, the dialogue mostly unrealistic and the narrative lazy - who actually thinks, 'he looked like he could eat her alive'? Apparently in this book two people have that thought. Even the landscape of rural northern Scotland - which could have proven richly thematic - is hard to conjure up in the imagination as it is under-written. It is nearly impossible to orientate oneself in the immediate environment of the key event as the detail is glossed over. Even the scene of crime - a bridge - is not adequately described until it is needed to tie up loose ends (at which point you find out that it is a single person bridge and apparently doesn't have sides or they are not high sides - is it a rope bridge? Or maybe a wooden one? Who knows?).
The multiple POV narrative is confusing and further complicated by the jump in time back and forth between days pre- and post- crime. The chapter headings are of the name of the current narrator and it would have been helpful if these were repeated at the top of each page as I found myself flicking back to the beginning of the chapter to remind myself who was talking - and this probably says something about the characters being unremarkable and hard to differentiate.
I could not believe this was written by a former fiction editor and I think it shows that the people from Pan MacMillan gave her an easy ride and perhaps assumed she was on top of both the writing and the editing production line because I found two major typographical errors in it.
It doesn't surprise me that this has been a commercial success. It is bubble gum fiction - a quick sugar fix and then easy to spit out. But like bubble gum, it is not satisfying.
At the end of the acknowledgments Foley says she is looking forward to seeing her book come alive in film. I would be too - the shortcuts she took in writing will be taken care of by the visual feast of the scenery, the nuances of the acting and hopefully, some tightening of the script. But as a book it reminded me of a Scooby Doo cartoon with a little bit of padding. I half expected someone to climb out of a bothy and say, "If it wasn't for those darned kids...".
The characters are two dimensional tropes, the dialogue mostly unrealistic and the narrative lazy - who actually thinks, 'he looked like he could eat her alive'? Apparently in this book two people have that thought. Even the landscape of rural northern Scotland - which could have proven richly thematic - is hard to conjure up in the imagination as it is under-written. It is nearly impossible to orientate oneself in the immediate environment of the key event as the detail is glossed over. Even the scene of crime - a bridge - is not adequately described until it is needed to tie up loose ends (at which point you find out that it is a single person bridge and apparently doesn't have sides or they are not high sides - is it a rope bridge? Or maybe a wooden one? Who knows?).
The multiple POV narrative is confusing and further complicated by the jump in time back and forth between days pre- and post- crime. The chapter headings are of the name of the current narrator and it would have been helpful if these were repeated at the top of each page as I found myself flicking back to the beginning of the chapter to remind myself who was talking - and this probably says something about the characters being unremarkable and hard to differentiate.
I could not believe this was written by a former fiction editor and I think it shows that the people from Pan MacMillan gave her an easy ride and perhaps assumed she was on top of both the writing and the editing production line because I found two major typographical errors in it.
It doesn't surprise me that this has been a commercial success. It is bubble gum fiction - a quick sugar fix and then easy to spit out. But like bubble gum, it is not satisfying.
At the end of the acknowledgments Foley says she is looking forward to seeing her book come alive in film. I would be too - the shortcuts she took in writing will be taken care of by the visual feast of the scenery, the nuances of the acting and hopefully, some tightening of the script. But as a book it reminded me of a Scooby Doo cartoon with a little bit of padding. I half expected someone to climb out of a bothy and say, "If it wasn't for those darned kids...".
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
June 13, 2019
– Shelved
