John of John - Douglas Stuart
I almost didn't want to write this review. John of John has had a huge amount of hype attached to it for months now, and the people who love it seem to really love it. So it's not exactly fun to sit down and admit that I didn't get on with it. But I didn't. This is the eleventh book I've read from this year's Booker Prize longlist, and it's comfortably my least favourite of the lot.
I've been deciding which book to read next by picking them out of a cup at random, so it's just chance that I came to this one so late. If this had landed earlier in my journey through the longlist I think I'd have DNFed it. The only reason I didn't is that by the time I got to it I'd already read ten other longlisted books, and I've become sort of stubbornly committed to finishing all of them, whether I'm enjoying myself or not.
On paper this should have been an easy win for me. It's exactly the kind of book I usually love. We've got an isolated community that still does things the old way, and a main character who's left and come back and is wrestling with how much his own perspective has shifted in the meantime. It's about secrets, old grudges, small rivalries simmering away under the surface. It's about the weight of responsibility and obligation, tradition against modernity, the sacrifices you make for people you love. It's also super gay. This should have been an easy win.
It wasn't. I was deeply bored for most of this book, and getting through it felt like a slog at times. Once I hit the halfway mark I just wanted to be done with it, and it kept going anyway. That's a shame, because I can absolutely see why people love this. It slots into a long Booker Prize tradition of books about people practising a traditional craft or trade that's dying out, and that's a theme I really enjoy in fiction. (I might put together a little shortlist of Booker books about dying trades and crafts at some point, if only to make myself feel better about having slogged through this one.)
What let it down for me, more than anything, was the prose. I can see what Stuart is going for, a sort of meandering, lyrical tone, but for me it just slipped into tedium. I never really connected with any of the characters' voices, and worse, I couldn't distinguish between them. This is a book that shifts narrative perspective constantly, and not just chapter to chapter, either. You'll be reading from one character's point of view, and then the next paragraph you're suddenly in someone else's head, with no real signal that the switch has happened. I found it jarring and a little difficult to follow, because everyone sounds the same on the page. I kept having to stop and ask myself whose head I was even in. It felt like the book wanted the benefits of both third person omniscient and third person limited without ever properly committing to either, and for me that just didn't work.
I'm giving John of John a 4 out of 10, which is the lowest score I've given anything on this year's Booker longlist. That's still a positive score from me, for what it's worth. It means the book was fine. I don't think it's a bad book, and I don't hate it. It just didn't land for me, and I was bored more often than I wasn't, which isn't a feeling I enjoy having about a book I was genuinely excited to read.
I know a lot of people adore this one, and I'd love to know what worked for you if you were one of them, because right now I'm struggling to see what turned this into a 10 out of 10 read for so many people. You can't win them all, I suppose. Two books left on the longlist, and I'm looking forward to both of them a great deal more than I was looking forward to finishing this one.