![]() ![]() Hoping to make a virtue of her absence, Barnes lays down a fog of negation. This is ambiguity not as subtlety, but avoidance: Finch simply isn’t there. Sounds a bit mysterious, doesn’t she? But no: she “had no ‘mysteriousness’ about her” either. She “wasn’t interested in football or celebrity chefs or the ever-changing dictates of fashion, or box sets or gossip”, but “she wasn’t in any way a snob” either. She never waved her arms about or supported her chin in her hand.” She was “not in any way a public figure”. “She had none of those lecturer’s tics and tricks designed to charm, distract, or indicate character. Finch, we’re told, “didn’t smoke like anyone else”. But that’s just the start of what she doesn’t do. “She commanded attention,” says Neil, spelling it out, “by her stillness.” As Neil labours at one of the novel’s many undercooked and unintegrated ideas the narrative flounders, never to recover By page six she’s “preternaturally still”. In the first paragraph, Finch is “still”. ![]() Straining to burnish Finch’s aura, he deploys, then redeploys, a reliable novelistic cliche – charisma through immobility. ![]() If Finch and her teaching fall short, our faith in the novel will falter. There’s a sense of daring in depicting the impact of an inspirational teacher. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |