About a week ago, I finished reading C.J. Tudor's The Chalk Man, which left me not really knowing what to say. I actually liked the novel, despite about a half dozen reasons I shouldn't have, the most serious of which was the jarring, unbelievable ending of the story. The Chalk Man presents a series of mysteries which upon close examination are revealed not to have been mysteries after all, along with a few mysteries which fall more into the category of 'the mystery of iniquity' in mankind, which makes them subject to disclosure though essentially insoluble.
The action takes place in a small English town that seems as malignant as Stephen King's Castle Rock, Maine, dying on the vine, rotten at the core. Obviously, not much good is likely to occur here but only irrepressible dissolution. And in fact the story leans heavily on King's work, especially The Body (better known as Stand by Me) in that it concerns the unhappy, often violent experiences of a group of young small town friends. In this case, however, the group, meaning well on the surface, are in their individual ways complicit not only in troubles that befall them but in the malignancies that have befallen the town itself.
The Chalk Man is, despite the sometimes clunky nature of the narrative, a rather deeply textured story that is much more about the force of the underlying current than about the course of the stream. It stays with you and kind of eats at you, making you pause and think back again, reexamine, reassess. Because of this grip on the deeper parts, I am inclined to forgive the jolt of the ending, for, even there, one can make sense of it if he goes back and listens again to what the main character said or hinted throughout.
No comments:
Post a Comment