Dakotajenny
09-11-2011, 04:06 PM
I'm new to writing book reviews but I'm rather proud of this one. If people have any comments on my writing style I'd be glad to hear them , but please be gentle. :)
I need to say right at the outset that I think Peter Jackal must be a complete lunatic and I never want to meet him. This is a very strange book about horrible things. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. The style is very classy, very unique and probably not everyone's cup of tea, but definitely mine.
To summarize the plot: Jackal finds himself brought back from the dead, and caught up in an ancient war between two forces of nature called the Left and Right Hands of the Beloved. Each hand gives power to its own band of shapeshifters. These are sorcerers who've learned to steal human life force to travel to other dimensions of consciousness and hopefully live forever. Shapeshifters of the Right are violent and aggressive. Those of the Left are devious and cunning. The two sides hate each other with a passion, and no one trusts anyone else in their dog eat dog battle for eternal life.
Trapped in the middle of all this hideous cruelty, the author is tricked, used, threatened and forced towards a horrible fate that's never fully revealed until the end. On the way, he falls tragically in love (more than once), and has a lot of fantastic sex, but all the time is just basically trying desperately to stay alive against impossible odds in a world that he knows nothing about.
As far as Jackal is concerned, good and evil are just points of view, and one merges into the other as he crosses the lines between the worlds. There's some wonderful symbolism where religion is used by shapeshifters both to deceive and to protect. In their teaching stories, they have their own peculiar take on everything from the Greek myths to the story of Jesus, and claim to know the true identity of the Devil himself. Believers will find some of what they say horribly blasphemous, but to me it added to the depth of the bizarre universe that the book reveals as the story unfolds.
One of the strangest ideas is that death itself is a horrific, female being that preys on human souls. According to Jackal, death is not only inevitable , but being eaten by her is the most horrible agony you can imagine. Perhaps that gives a flavor of the bleakness of the author's vision.
The story is fast and gripping. It all seems to take place over a few weeks during a freezing winter in a very desolate Welsh landscape. Contrast that with the carefully crafted, sometimes almost poetic language that Jackal seems to love and the result is a gothic masterpiece. I wouldn't recommend this book to you if you like short, sharp, punchy sentences. On the other hand, if you're a fan of beautiful words, then you'll probably get a big kick out of it.
Judging by the spelling and language, not to mention what's written inside the cover, Jackal is clearly a British writer and as I say, the story is set in Wales, Great Britain. This gave the book a cold, distant feeling of far off magic, a bit like the film: American Werewolf in London. I comforted myself at times by putting the madness at arm's length on the other side of the world.
Jackal doesn't bother to give names to a lot of his characters. He simply calls them as he sees them. This is quite appealing in its own right, with The Rapist, The Invisible Indian, The Priest and The Puppet Master populating the world of his strange imagination. It also made it easy to remember who he's talking about as well. This is important because he builds a whole new universe as the action rips along. It's a vast and disturbing picture but I found it fascinating. The book is very dark and deeply obsessed with this ghastly vision of the world, but in lighter moments it's romantic, very touching and funny, and a lot of it is downright sexy.
Jackal is candid in his description of himself as a cruel, callous and often violent man. In the book, he's a self confessed rapist and murderer, though he commits his insane crimes in states of vividly described altered reality. Despite all this nastiness, there's a humble quality of vulnerability about him as his he tries to hang on to what he loves while everything is getting more and more out of his control And the people he tortures to death really deserve what they get. All in all, it made me root for him right up to the brutal and sadistic climax. At that point there was a final relief from all the layers of mystery as everything began to make sense in a surprisingly tender and hopeful ending that I hadn't expected a murderous brute like Jackal to be capable of.
I was kind of disappointed that the story ended when it did. At about 350 pages of large paperback, it was a decent read, but I wanted more, and the ending deliberately posed some huge questions about what was going to happen next. A sequel is promised at the end of the epilogue and it definitely feels like it should be part of a series because there was so much more wonderful weirdness hinted at throughout the book.
I knew when I finished it that this was a book that I was going to read again. It was even better second time around. Some of the writing is really lovely, and there are layers and layers to the bizarre cosmology it describes.
I don't believe the central mythos of the book: that these are things that somehow really happened, but who knows, perhaps in Jackal's peculiar brain, this really is what the world looks like. God help him and pray god he writes another.
Jenny D x
I need to say right at the outset that I think Peter Jackal must be a complete lunatic and I never want to meet him. This is a very strange book about horrible things. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. The style is very classy, very unique and probably not everyone's cup of tea, but definitely mine.
To summarize the plot: Jackal finds himself brought back from the dead, and caught up in an ancient war between two forces of nature called the Left and Right Hands of the Beloved. Each hand gives power to its own band of shapeshifters. These are sorcerers who've learned to steal human life force to travel to other dimensions of consciousness and hopefully live forever. Shapeshifters of the Right are violent and aggressive. Those of the Left are devious and cunning. The two sides hate each other with a passion, and no one trusts anyone else in their dog eat dog battle for eternal life.
Trapped in the middle of all this hideous cruelty, the author is tricked, used, threatened and forced towards a horrible fate that's never fully revealed until the end. On the way, he falls tragically in love (more than once), and has a lot of fantastic sex, but all the time is just basically trying desperately to stay alive against impossible odds in a world that he knows nothing about.
As far as Jackal is concerned, good and evil are just points of view, and one merges into the other as he crosses the lines between the worlds. There's some wonderful symbolism where religion is used by shapeshifters both to deceive and to protect. In their teaching stories, they have their own peculiar take on everything from the Greek myths to the story of Jesus, and claim to know the true identity of the Devil himself. Believers will find some of what they say horribly blasphemous, but to me it added to the depth of the bizarre universe that the book reveals as the story unfolds.
One of the strangest ideas is that death itself is a horrific, female being that preys on human souls. According to Jackal, death is not only inevitable , but being eaten by her is the most horrible agony you can imagine. Perhaps that gives a flavor of the bleakness of the author's vision.
The story is fast and gripping. It all seems to take place over a few weeks during a freezing winter in a very desolate Welsh landscape. Contrast that with the carefully crafted, sometimes almost poetic language that Jackal seems to love and the result is a gothic masterpiece. I wouldn't recommend this book to you if you like short, sharp, punchy sentences. On the other hand, if you're a fan of beautiful words, then you'll probably get a big kick out of it.
Judging by the spelling and language, not to mention what's written inside the cover, Jackal is clearly a British writer and as I say, the story is set in Wales, Great Britain. This gave the book a cold, distant feeling of far off magic, a bit like the film: American Werewolf in London. I comforted myself at times by putting the madness at arm's length on the other side of the world.
Jackal doesn't bother to give names to a lot of his characters. He simply calls them as he sees them. This is quite appealing in its own right, with The Rapist, The Invisible Indian, The Priest and The Puppet Master populating the world of his strange imagination. It also made it easy to remember who he's talking about as well. This is important because he builds a whole new universe as the action rips along. It's a vast and disturbing picture but I found it fascinating. The book is very dark and deeply obsessed with this ghastly vision of the world, but in lighter moments it's romantic, very touching and funny, and a lot of it is downright sexy.
Jackal is candid in his description of himself as a cruel, callous and often violent man. In the book, he's a self confessed rapist and murderer, though he commits his insane crimes in states of vividly described altered reality. Despite all this nastiness, there's a humble quality of vulnerability about him as his he tries to hang on to what he loves while everything is getting more and more out of his control And the people he tortures to death really deserve what they get. All in all, it made me root for him right up to the brutal and sadistic climax. At that point there was a final relief from all the layers of mystery as everything began to make sense in a surprisingly tender and hopeful ending that I hadn't expected a murderous brute like Jackal to be capable of.
I was kind of disappointed that the story ended when it did. At about 350 pages of large paperback, it was a decent read, but I wanted more, and the ending deliberately posed some huge questions about what was going to happen next. A sequel is promised at the end of the epilogue and it definitely feels like it should be part of a series because there was so much more wonderful weirdness hinted at throughout the book.
I knew when I finished it that this was a book that I was going to read again. It was even better second time around. Some of the writing is really lovely, and there are layers and layers to the bizarre cosmology it describes.
I don't believe the central mythos of the book: that these are things that somehow really happened, but who knows, perhaps in Jackal's peculiar brain, this really is what the world looks like. God help him and pray god he writes another.
Jenny D x