Communion Town by Sam Thompson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I am giving Communion Town two stars for the simple reason that I did not enjoy it much. I can’t say that it is a good book, and I don’t want to be guilty of pandering to a kind of hive-intelligentsia just because it was chosen for the 2012 Booker long list. Let these ratings stand for how one liked the book, not how one assumes it will be received by literary critics. I’ve never read anything else by this author, and freely admit that maybe I just didn’t “get it.”
Ten stories, apparently, and according to some blurb somewhere, all of them about the same city. I guess. I didn’t feel any kind of cohesiveness between the stories at all. If this was a fictional town, I didn’t get any sense of its character. If it’s supposed to be a fictionalization of a real city, I have no idea which city. And, again, maybe that’s just me—I’m sure someone has written books about New York and London and Paris and LA and Tokyo. This was none of those.
The truth is I got stuck on one of the stories, and it took me a lot longer to read this than it should have. It was all so very atmospheric without having any atmosphere. So much descriptive meditation, with nothing described. And odd bits tossed in, unexplained and unexplored and even unexploited.
Which is why I’m giving it two stars, because normally, I just love a well-crafted sentence. Maybe these were supposed to be that, but I kept falling asleep. I found myself not picking up the book when I did have time, but choosing to do other things. Honestly, the only reason I finished is because I’ve committed myself to reading all the long list books this year.
Don’t get me wrong—bits of it were good. I liked the one about the city of the mind and the almost cartoonish detectives. The one about the semi-invalid woman had potential, and the one about the serial killer and the abattoir. That all sounds like juicy stuff, right? But like I said, unexplained and unexploited.
Maybe it’s time for me to admit I’m no literarian myself, and that I just like a good story. If that’s so, then, two stars for Communion Town, as there’s really no story there at all.