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A review by xb_bi
Happy Valley by Patrick White
2.0
At the beginning, this was very promising. The narrative is character-driven, detailed, with interesting plot points and a focus on domestic life, which interested me. Despite the detailed description of each character, I still felt very detached from them - I think this was because White used their full names when referencing them, which put me off a little. I couldn't feel sympathy, dislike, anything towards the characters because I simply didn't care enough about them. This made anything that happened to them completely redundant in my mind.
What bothered me most were the apparent streams of consciousness that White included. These were generally dense paragraphs of unfinished sentences describing what I can only assume are the characters thoughts, and I didn't understand them at all. Unfortunately, they appeared so frequently that most of the time I had no clue what was going on. This only served to detach me further from the storyline.
The last 100 pages was utter hell to read. I just wanted it to end. To top it all off, the ending was abrupt and anticlimatic.
I can't give this one star as I must give credit where it's due - I will happily believe that White's other works are better than this, this having been his debut. However, that is not to say I will be picking up another of his novels anytime soon.
What bothered me most were the apparent streams of consciousness that White included. These were generally dense paragraphs of unfinished sentences describing what I can only assume are the characters thoughts, and I didn't understand them at all. Unfortunately, they appeared so frequently that most of the time I had no clue what was going on. This only served to detach me further from the storyline.
The last 100 pages was utter hell to read. I just wanted it to end. To top it all off, the ending was abrupt and anticlimatic.
I can't give this one star as I must give credit where it's due - I will happily believe that White's other works are better than this, this having been his debut. However, that is not to say I will be picking up another of his novels anytime soon.