Skip to main content

Review 2: By Chance or Providence by Becky Cloonan

By Chance or Providence
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

By Chance or Providence is a collection of three short visual stories written as love-letters to mediaeval mythology. They follow the conventions pretty neatly: there are dark woods with monsters, sex and death intertwine and everyone ends up more miserable than an Eastenders Christmas Special.

By far the strongest narrative is the final instalment in the trilogy, Demeter. A woman whose husband is lost in a storm does a deal with the sea to get him back for just a little time – and then lives in perpetual fear of the time when he’ll be snatched away again. The slow shuffling approach of death, like a George Romero zombie or the inevitable return to work after a holiday, hangs over every pane.

Cloonan has two clear storytelling strengths. Her first is pacing. These stories are short – sparse, even – but each development or step is allowed time to breathe, and have an impact on the reader. She achieves this through careful structuring of the whole page, allowing a neat balance and symmetry in the way she tells the story.

Her other clear strength lies in knowing what doesn’t need to be said. The dialogue is minimal, letting the artwork shoulder the majority of the work. There’s also a section of concept art at the end of the book that makes it clear how much of the stories have been drawn up and then cut out. This makes the stories immeasurably stronger – it lets the readers fill in the gaps, immersing you more.

The artwork, though, is far and away the star of the show. It’s an interesting fusion of a fairly Western style with little hints of Manga. This style lets her convey complex emotions from the simple set of a character’s eyebrows, or the pursing of lips. It’s both effective and elegant, like a Dyson hand-dryer done out in mother-of-pearl. There are also just some really neat touches, stylistically – trees twisted to reveal the ghosts haunting a character, branches used to separate panes. These are, in some ways, small touches, but they contribute immeasurably to the whole.

I’ve given this three out of five stars (it would be three-and-a-half, but Goodreads frowns on my natural inclination to ambiguity and half-measures) because I think the writing isn’t completely where it could be. It plays heavily to tropes, which is to be expected, but doesn’t lend a fresh perspective to them particularly, which isn’t. I did enjoy it though, particularly visually, and will definitely be reading more by her – hopefully East Coast Rising, about which I’ve heard really good things.

---

This is my second book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 19: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I imagine a lot of unimaginative reviews of this book say something like, Eleanor Oliphant is not Completely Fine, contrary to the title! and then they laugh at their own tiny joke for four hours. You won’t find that here, even though it is both true and apposite. Instead you’ll see me saying: this is a really great book. Even forgetting the inspired name of the protagonist, which never stops sounding like the name of an elegant elephant, it’s really good. Eleanor Oliphant lives alone and has forged an existence for herself of work, trips to the local Tesco Metro, and gentle, vodka-infused oblivion on the weekends. She doesn’t deal well with people. In fact, Oliphant displays an almost total lack of empathy. At first, you suspect that she may be autistic, since she shows all the signs: difficulty relating to others, low tolerance for leaving her routines, having to learn the outward signs of emotions by rote and experience, rather than innately understanding the differe...
2 comments
Read more

Review 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 1: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. How could you not love a book that begins like that? Early on in Stasiland , Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime. It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem. ...
1 comment
Read more