A Place Called Here – Cecelia Ahern

Bit of a catch-up here: I read three books during a week's holiday in Pembrokeshire at the end of October and have only just got around to posting my thoughts on them (even though I wrote these thoughts while I was there).

After P.S. I Love You and Thanks for the Memories, this wasn’t what I expected. While the latter had a single element of fantasy in what otherwise felt a very real setting, this whole book felt like a bit of a dream. I didn’t feel I knew where it was going next, and, I got the feeling, neither did the author when she wrote it. Was this one of those books where the author just sat and wrote and followed the story as it unfolded? I always like to know (when I write) where I’m going, even if some of the twists and turns along the way might evolve in the telling. But I gather there are people who start writing without knowing where it’s going and that works just as well for them.

Maybe I felt I couldn’t get into the characters quite as well as in other books. Certainly the place called “Here” felt quite unrealistic to me in many ways. Some were quite mundane – the registration area seemed to have an implausible number of desks and doors in it, and the numbers of people living in the village seem wildly inconsistent. More than that, though, I was suspicious of the description of this seemingly idyllic community – ok, it becomes less so in some ways as it goes on – as it seemed to me somewhat in conflict with human nature.

The way the book is set out is in two stories that barely meet until the end. For me they felt just too disparate for this to work, although only just. I guess I like the real world in my reading so it’s inevitable I’d get on better with Jack’s thread than Sandy’s. There was also a third thread, really the unfolding through progressive revelation (if that’s the term) of Sandy’s back story and relationship. I have to say I struggled with that to some extent, and maybe I’m not so comfortable with the fashionable trend for starting at a key scene and then filling in what went before. (That’s not how we live life, after all). Although to some extent pretty much all books do the same thing – there are elements of Martin’s back story in Home that we don’t know in chapter one, but I guess the difference is we know pretty much where he is. I felt a bit cheated with Sandy reading about the development of her relationship with Gregory, as each chapter she related seemed to give the impression that was all there was, whereas obviously at the point of the story Sandy would have known what happened all the way to “now”. Maybe the moral of this is that you can find out about a character progressively from stuff that just happens or comes up for whatever reason, but if you feel they’re deliberately withholding information from you then you struggle to put yourself in their shoes?

I guess I didn’t find the ending entirely satisfactory either – how could it have been? But it did keep me reading avidly right to the end, not least because until I got there I had no real sense of how the book would end. That’s probably a good thing.

I’m also wondering if how I feel about a book says as much about where I was when I read it as it does about what’s printed on the pages – maybe more than I appreciate myself.