Author: Barbara Hodgson
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Rating: WARTY!
This novel started out right up there with Frances Hardinge's efforts for being downright weird, so it drew me in right away, but in the end it became tedious, repetitive, dull, and boring. Barbara Hodgson is an artist who has written several novels and this is the first of hers that I've read. And probably the last, which is sad, because the format of this novel is quite charming. It contains multiple illustrations and fold-outs representing the materials of which the main character comes into possession as she rides a train into Vienna, Austria and meets with people in an effort to try and discover what has happened to her deadbeat husband who has been missing for three months. He has often gone off for weeks at a time, ignoring her letters and failing to contact her, but the editor from the newspaper he's working for on a story about art theft or art forgery (it’s unclear which it is at first) calls her to see if she knows where her husband is, because the story is overdue and he hasn’t heard from him. Thus her forlorn quest begins.
She takes off into Europe and encounters three strange women and a strange train conductor during the journey before she even leaves the train - and that's just for starters! One of the women leaves her a box which contains an antique book in which hollowed-out pages hold a magnifying glass and six vials of herbal medicines. The materials are ancient. Everyone she meets seems to know something about her or her quest, and everyone seems to want to trade her something of theirs for something she has - seemingly insignificant, ordinary and occasionally disgusting objects, such as a molar tooth which an elevator operator trades her for one of the pearls decorating the box lid.
Helen runs into one offbeat character after another and takes it all in stride, very much like one would do in a dream. She seems to become quite easily distracted from her purported main purpose of tracking down her husband (about whom I'd long given up caring anyway), and side-tracks into pursuing a discovery adventure of Flemish printer Andreas Vesalius and the woodblocks he created for a publication he produced on anatomy. These blocks were thought to have disappeared during the bombing of a Berlin in World War Two, but maybe they were not all destroyed, in which case any existing ones may have survived. Is this why the director of a museum has been murdered? Did Helen murder him?
There are some weird references too, such as the one to Felice Fontana (1730-1805). Hodgson describes this character - represented as a wax figure in an obscure European museum - as a woman, but that name and those dates apply to a man who was a physician. Whether Hodgson knows this and is playing, or is simply ignorant, or is merely trying to ratchet up the absurdity factor I have no idea. I just found that interesting. There may be other such references that I missed. But the problem for me was that her quest for her husband was uninteresting and when she effectively abandoned that, I was given nothing else even remotely interesting to engage me.
Of all her encounters, Helen's first is the one which most unsettles her, because she seems to be the very same person as the one she first meets on the train. She doesn’t realize this at first because the other the person is aged and significantly overweight, but when Helen finally gets a look at a picture of the other woman when she was younger, she notes a striking resemblance to herself. In addition to this, Helen seems to be traveling in an earlier time - much earlier than 1998 when this novel was published. She goes by train, not airplane, and she has no cell phone or email. The impression I increasingly had in reading this novel was that the real Helen was not the younger version, but the older one, and was possibly lying in a bed somewhere dying of old age, or in a coma, and recalling her younger life. So: trope-ish and boring.
It was all well and good and rather fun and intriguing to begin with, but as the novel creeps towards some 300 pages of nothing but this stuff, the novelty value wears off, and as Helen becomes more and more obsessed with Vesalius's wood blocks, it starts to become completely uninteresting. Normally I would have ditched a novel like this, but I kept trying to stay with it. When I realized I had only some seventy pages remaining, and since I had enjoyed the beginning so much, I decided to try and finish it even if I no longer liked it.
I got within 35 pages of the ending, but I couldn't stand the mindless diversions into Vesalius's wooden blocks and the increasingly repetitive nature of the story-telling. I felt more and more like this was going quite literally nowhere and I reached a point where I decided that there was no payoff, no matter how brilliant nor how miraculous it may be, that could make up for the effort I was being forced to put in! Hodgson, if this was some kind of a big joke on your readers - which I could easily believe - you got me, but you didn't get me all the way to the end. WARTY! Life is way too short to waste on that kind of writing where "literary" is used as a really poor euphemism for 'self-indulgently soporific', not when there's other much more engaging and exciting material waiting to be read.
