bits and bants vol.42

The Father's Tale and why it's good to talk about bad books

Before I go full rant, because I know you’re preparing yourself, I want to talk a little bit about why it’s good to talk about bad books, and what we don’t like about books. I’ve recently seen a weird amount of kickback from people who are mad over people speaking negatively about books which I think is a bit crazy. I even think that it can be good to read bad books, or books that aren’t objectively great, because they can be entertaining and escapist and a generally good time. I think it is a good thing to hear negative things about your favourite books! We can love The Lord of the Rings and still think Tolkien talks a little too much about trees. I love Jane Austen fiercely but she really never has scenes with just men speaking. Tolstoy is a master but he also liked to throw in a diatribe about farming a little too frequently.

If we can’t talk about what we don’t like in books, we won’t know why we like what we like in the books we read. If we don’t talk about what detracts from a story we won’t appreciate the aspects of good storytelling. And while there is a spectrum of subjective taste to why we like what we like, there are fundamental criteria and standards that make successful books. We of course can talk about those things! We don’t have to be college professors in order to talk about what works and what doesn’t in the books we read.

To be honest, it’s also incredibly satisfying to talk about books we don’t like! It’s perfectly possible to talk about books we don’t like without defaming or personally insulting an author. Authors are adults who understand that any work they produce will be subject to evaluation and discussion. It is their actual job. And if we’re talking about authors long since dead I really don’t think they’re going to mind.

Which brings me to my book review rant about The Father’s Tale by Michael O’Brien. Now, I’m probably not even going to get to everything that I hated about this book because of simple time constraints, I gotta get my kids places in a hour, but I am going to dive right in. And I have no problem vocally and loudly admitting that I truly hated everything about this book. I’m not here to try and find the positives because this book made me rage. If you’re looking for hand holding and trying to find the best you’ve come to the wrong place. If you want a book review that does not drop f-bombs, also, the wrong place. Very rarely do I hate a book so much. I read a lot of not-great books that I have problems with, that I would definitely change if I had the ability, and that have objectively not great content or technical aspects, but to have so many of these things in one book that was written to be the length of three books is so offensive to me that I have to write about it.

I’m not going to belabour your with too much of a summary of this tome upon a tome, but the book starts out being the story of a ordinary father who wants to help his adult son who has fallen into some kind of religious cult while at university in Oxford. That is the plot line that the book never really sticks to but goes on to become a hackneyed spiritual journey that takes the main character, Alex Graham, from small town Canada to Russia where he meets a myriad of characters who have zero impact on the actual story other than to spend entire pages of monologue giving Alex their entire life stories of sufferings. The ending of this 1,000 page book is so frustrating because it takes all the interesting aspects of the story and wraps them up un-satisfyingly in about three pages after forcing us to endure so much that didn’t matter.

If you know me and my book reviews at all, you know I say about 9 times out of 10 that a book should have been edited to be more tightly constructed. I just really appreciate well constructed, thought out narratives. I don’t like excess because it usually detracts from the style and content of the actual story. And I love story! I love a thousand pages of one character. Give me Gone With the Wind, Middlemarch, or Kristin Lavransdatter and I won’t complain about length one bit. But those were epic tales that told the story well, that deserved their pages, and that even granted the authors extra milage because of their fantastic prose, original characters, and life-changing plots.

The Father’s Tale is not epic. Its prose is so textbook-like that beauty is not an excuse to make an extra 5800 pages to tell this story. The dialogue is almost unbearable. It is not realistic nor is it profound. The use of so many characters who are supposed to be these interesting talismans on Alex’s journey are used in the exact same way so often that by the time he arrives in Russia and the real telling of life stories of every single person he comes in contact with begins, the reader is so weary that the names of these characters don’t even register. I kept thinking that the building, or rather, descriptions of these characters over and over again was going to lead to a bigger more interconnected story that would bring us back to these characters, or that the characters would have meaning to the missing son, but no, the characters were just there to describe another aspect of suffering in life.

This book really is 1,000 pages of O’Brien telling us that everyone suffers and that suffering is the only meaningful part of life that can lead us to understand real love. We get it Michael O’Brien, you really love suffering. I would love if there were even a shade of subtly and nuance, but there is zero. O’Brien just states these things expecting the reader to somehow give what’s happening in the story an assumed sense of drama because it’s happening in Russia?

Actually I think the thing Michael O’Brien loves more than suffering is Russia.

Michael O’Brien fucking loves Russia.

To give him due props, his descriptions of Russian landscape and atmosphere are probably the most successful of the entire book. But the dialogue he gives to the people, the repeated and repeated bashing over the head of how Russians are inherently so spiritual and so long-suffering, is excruciating. By the time I reached a random story about reindeer and how it was some fable about eastern and western spirituality I just could not give less fucks. I actually was completely out of fucks. Because this book. is. too. long.

How this book was not in some fashion edited I am still struggling to understand. Please, let me take a giant red pen to so many monologues, so many needless chapters of dialogue that didn’t further the story and only led to me hating this main character more.

I feel like I don’t even need mention it, but the biggest fault after a dire need of real editing, is the pacing. Obviously when you pick up a thousand page doorstopper you feel like you’re in it for the long haul. You’re expecting the plot to take 100 pages to get into. I will definitely allow a slow start to a novel, but what a good novel needs is well constructed pacing. This book happens in fits and starts. I felt like just when O’Brien had built us up to a place of interesting tension, he never quite gets to real drama, he would completely abandon the situation. This isn’t The Odyssey. There are not satisfying obstacles to be tackled, Alex just clumsily traipses across Europe on slim evidence of his son with no real plan. This is neither a spy novel or thriller where the action builds and the reader begins to connect dots along the way to a final climactic experience. Yet to be a more developed spiritual tale built upon character we would need more actual inner development shown. But there again we hit another fatal flaw with this story, the complete absence of showing and not telling.

O’Brien only tells. That is why all the stilted monologues are needed, to tell us exactly what suffering means! We aren’t shown what it means, we are only told again and again and again by every single character. The inner dialogue of the main character is intolerable because it is so boring and he is simply so annoying. Russians suffer so much because they tell us they suffer so much! And don’t worry about connecting the spiritual suffering of those under atheistic communist governments, Alex is right there to TELL us that western societies are equally fatal to the soul. We can really just check our critical thinking at the door with this book, all will be explained! Lengthily. Over and over again.

I would be remiss to not touch upon the obvious Catholic content of this novel which I assume is the only reason why this was picked to be a book club read. While it is refreshing to see the faith and the spiritual life treated seriously in a novel, we can’t ignore the shortfalls simply because it has Catholic themes. These Catholic themes again are handled clumsily at best, and heavy handedly in sections at worst. I can’t imagine handing this novel to someone who isn’t Catholic and expect them to take the novel seriously. If you read Goodreads reviews a common problem brought up is how there the majority of characters are presented as having faith and only one character is shown to be even questioning God’s existence. While that doesn’t automatically mean the story is bad, it does reenforce the unneeded repetition in the characters O’Brien creates. I also don’t think that much spiritual development actually happens, and while I have heard criticism of this idea as a reflection of what spiritual development looks like in real life, the skilled author takes the ordinary in life and makes it compelling through craft and technical skill. O’Brien doesn’t make it compelling. Even if the reader can accept meaning in the suffering that happens to Alex in The Father’s Tale, I don’t think there’s much of a case of his progressing in the spiritual life other than realizing the importance of suffering, and even if he did progress in the spiritual life it did not make him less boring a character to follow for so many pages! Just because a character is Catholic does not make him interesting!

I also think the last section of the book is completely egregious. I couldn’t stand it. I audibly screamed at the audiobook. To throw in a section where this boring, stupid man is stuck in Siberia but somehow obviously becomes assumed to be a spy by the Russian and then Chinese governments was just unbearably unbelievable. It honestly pains me to even write it. It was embarrassingly bad. Why O’Brien felt like that entire section was necessary I will never understand. It made no sense to the story itself, and seemed to be added only to add to Alex’s suffering? And yet it added another 200 pages! And no editor ever said to him this is entirely unnecessary and unbelievable? Alex Graham is no Tom Cruise. Spare me! Luckily I had no credibility left in the book by that point, but I can only hope that some finally relented in defending this ill conceived novel when accusations of spying in Siberia occurred!

I’m sure O’Brien (and the Well Read Mom book club) wanted there to be a moral of a father going to the ends of the earth to save his son, but the fact that the son was never present in the book until the final five pages counteracts these grand fatherly ideals. To me, for a book to be solidly about the journey of a father there needs to be some actual representation and revealing of a father and son relationship which never happens between Alex and his sons. It happens to some degree with Alex and the boys he befriends in Russia, but that seemed to be only a feeble doubling and episode to display to us blatantly that Alex learns to be a father! But again, it felt so forced and overwritten without being interesting that I simply wasn’t interested in reading about it. I could not have cared less about what Alex learned or didn’t learn by page 700 because I just wanted it to be done.

(As a complete aside I read this book through audio and it was the worst audiobook production I’ve ever heard. I am more than able to put aside bad production quality to judge the book itself, but it cannot be overstated how bad this audiobook was. To the point where I questioned what the tone of the story was meant to be in the first few hours of the book. The voices were at times offensive and stereotypical, but also completely inappropriate. I am not sure when the audiobook was produced, but I am operating from a place where I hope it was made before audiobook production advanced in the past decade.)

Bad books whether they contain a Catholic theme or not need to be compelling to a reader in order to engage ideas. A thousand page book is naturally held to a higher standard due to its length, but this book never earned its length, it only made the reader suffer longer. But because O’Brien wanted to teach us about suffering, maybe in a roundabout way he succeeded.

---

bits:

• I somehow missed this great article by

  Kerri Christopher
  from December about teenage girls deserving reality, and this concept is so important. I find it a very important idea in parenting my teens in general, there is such an ease from the disembodied world of the internet for teenagers to completely disengage from reality and create their own. It takes real intention to keep reaffirming reality and it’s higher importance in their lives.

• A fascinating piece on St. Thomas More’s birthplace. Or fascinating to me who finds all the minutiae of London history interesting. I am so predictable.

---

reading, watching, what have you:

• Severance. My mind continues to be blown and we started the second season immediately on finishing the season one finale, I honestly don’t know how any of you lasted three whole years!!

• Our book club is following up The Father’s Tale with Steinbeck’s The Pearl, and I think it’s safe to say that I can now go a very long time before reading any more moralistic fiction. I can’t think of another literary technique that can kill enjoyment in reading fiction quicker than a story trying to tell “a moral”.

• It has been fairly cold here all week and I’ve succumbed and started seeds. It’s very early yet, but I am starting geraniums and other perennials that I know can take a bit longer to grow on indoors. This isn’t my first rodeo, and starting seeds is one of the only things to look forward to in February!

---

I’ve kept you long enough, let’s not even talk about the football game happening this weekend. I am looking forward to some kind of cake my daughter is going to bake tomorrow. I hope it’s chocolate.

sending warm wishes in the most literal sense,

Christy