A review by kbuchanan
To Calais, in Ordinary Time by James Meek

3.0

I really wanted to like this one, as the writing was occasionally extraordinarily beautiful, and its premise seems very much my sort of thing. However, it just ended up feeling a little tedious. I certainly don't need my novels to be action-packed, but this was static in the extreme, filled with several characters that seemed nigh superfluous but with whom we kept trying and trying to engage. The interesting things that the author was trying to do linguistically have, I believe, been done better elsewhere, with the pseudo-Cotswolds dialect had the unfortunate result of making the novel seem more cumbersome to read than it really should have. Still, there are some central relationships that make the novel worth hanging on for, and the larger issues at play especially during our own global pandemic make this a timely read, if one not without its flaws.