AuthorHouse, 377 pages, (paperback 978-1-4259-6291-3 (Reviewed: January 2013) ... Paul Garner is is falling in love with his classmate. Bethany is mysterious, shy to everyone but him, and their romance epitomizes adolescent love – innocent, sincere, and intense. No less intense is Paul’s heartbreak when Bethany succumbs to a terrible disease. Such is the set-up of Tales of Jonathan, a story that becomes much more than a simple look at love and loss as the plot unwinds. Grief-stricken and searching for meaning after Bethany’s death, Paul is given an unusual assignment by his English professor: finish a play that Bethany was writing. Here, the novel takes an unusual turn as Paul loses himself in the play and his characters evolve into autonomous agents. One such character explains it this way: “When a story ends it does not die…if you direct the narrative to no end, it is no longer a story: it has become your reality.” And so the play loses its original direction, and Paul’s surrogate character seeks out Bethany’s in a series of romantically charged reunions. It is repetitive, and that seems meaningful – like some Nietzschean eternal recurrence. There is a certain charm to Nicol’s prose, and he captures difficult emotions (grief, awe, adoration) with notable skill. But even Paul’s surrogate notices the difficulty of a love story in which the object of affection may not be real: “Is my companion my own creation? …a false hope on this long journey? …when did this story begin?” In the end, the answers to these, and other questions, may be no less clear to the reader than the narrator. Review A looping tale within a tale about a boy, a girl, and the search for love in a world where words are meaningless. As Nicol invites readers into dreams and memories cobbled into a Möbius strip, there’s little sense of what’s real andwhat’s not. The first of seven segments suggests that the novel will concern schoolboy Paul Garner and the enchanting Bethany Dean, who tragically dies young, while they explore love. They write and perform a school play, but as other segments are introduced, the narrative shifts and the play vanishes, then reappears, confusing readers about which part is “real” and which part is just something the “author” (a character in the story) wrote. First, the narrator, Paul, turns into Daniel Bikker, a gravedigger; then, Daniel becomes Jonathan Prack, Bethany’s brother. Meanwhile, Bethany has become Megan, who sometimes turns into Tyamka, whom Jonathan calls a sea angel, protected by her dog, Bizra. Other characters go through similar shifts. Readers are told that progress “is a word with meaning only for its users. Characters wander through moors. They explore grottoes. They love the ocean. They enter houses and sit. They are kind to each other. Still, a few recurring items and events—a visit, a walk, a room, drawing, gardens, blue fish, tea, etc.—tie the book together in different scenes with similar dialogue creating similar situations. Repeated sentences rearrange the hero’s attempts to revisit reality—he may be psychotic, in a coma or dreaming—and sometimes the “author” appears, occasionally accompanied by bureaucrats, doctors or other authority figures. Lyrical prose—“I have doubts of resolution and fears of being lost in times and places I do not understand; they loom before me, obscuring my path and threatening diversion in directions I do not trust”—provides a bit of direction, but that might not be enough for some readers. Elegant but bewildering. Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media indie@kirkusreviews
Posted on: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 06:54:52 +0000