My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It took me 28 days to read a book I didn’t enjoy. It took me about 18 hours to get through Swimming Home, so what does that say? One thing it says: short book. “Slender” is the word I see other reviewers use. Somebody’s probably got something to say about modern attention spans and novels these days, although I wonder if it’s more a matter of readers being smarter than they use to be. I’m rationalizing, trying to justify the book’s brevity, to justify my enjoyment of it. I don’ know the author very well, so who’s to say: in another writer’s hands, there would have been more back story, more history. And that would have been a different novel.
Five people on holiday, each a stranger to the others thanks to the strangeness that intimacy breeds. And then another stranger arrives, stranger than them all, and a new intimacy opens everything up. A tried and true formula, with two possible outcomes: the solid foundation survives, or the crumbling foundation founders. This is a short novel, so you can probably guess the ending.
There’s language and emotion, but not too much to get in the way. There’s economy of scene, nearly but not quite absurd. Maybe that’s how they do things in Europe these days, maybe I’m not worldly enough to know how vacationing Englanders behave in southern France. It was a bit alien though, and I was able to keep the characters at arm’s length enough to keep from being absorbed. A short novel, too brief to immerse yourself in, despite all the obvious symbolism.