Crocus Hour

by Charlotte Randall

In a village café in Crete, 1981, a young backpacker is befriended by a troubled New Zealander, Henry Davis. He reveals that his daughter Sally vanished from the island two years earlier and he has come to Crete to explore the baffling circumstances of her disappearance. For Davis there are painful unanswered questions. What happened to Sally? Who was to blame for her mysterious disappearance? Was it an accident?  Davis soon has to confront the painful possibility that Sally herself may have planned a deliberate flight from a too-protective father. And who was the real Sally?From the author of the award-winning The Curative, The Crocus Hour is a spellbinding journey through shifting passages of time, posing questions about how well we really know those close to us.

271 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Charlotte Randall is the award-winning author of five novels. Her first, Dead Sea Fruit, won the South East Asian/South Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book and the Reed Fiction Award in 1995. Her much-praised second novel, The Curative, was join runner-up for the Deutz Medal for fiction at the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. What Happen Then, Mr Bones? (2004) and The Crocus Hour (2008) were finalists for the same award.
Randall was born and raised in Dunedin, New Zealand and now lives in Christchurch with her husband and children.

Reviews

[Rodney Farrant · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was drawn to the book by it's cover and the blurb on the back. Unfortunately I was frustrated, it meandered a lot and I really didn't engage with the characters. It's one redeeming quality was the beautiful descriptions of the Cretan and New Zealand landscape, and the food.

[PeePee L · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had described moments beautifully, therefore it was hard to keep track on where you were in the book or what was happening. The description of each scene was filled with so many adjectives and nuances of each word made everything so busy. I had no idea what the actual plot was once I read further into the book. There were some good oneliners in this book, but very limited. Out of the three parts I had only enjoyed part one, mostly because that's where everything was set up and I was awaiting more action due to the blurb, but nothing. I also appreciated the sort of recognition the girls in the book have, how it dives into their flaws and influenced selfs. But the otherbcharacters were enervating, you've got someone with a superiority complex, a pitiful obsessed guy, and the third character who I actually did like because she was the only real one even though she was sort of a sheep to a shephard.

Overall the words in the book were too much set as words and not a story, where I would read a page but not recall one single word relavent to the actual plot. I do think the idea could have flourished way more and given more of an identity to the main character instead of having him just tell the story of another.

[Sarah Laing · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book because of the beauty of the language, and the carefully described greek village - the truck full of lemons, the caves filled with dirty hippies. i read a listener review and i didn't agree that the henry character lacked charisma -- i thought he was cool. i was fascinated by the medical garden and rasputin obsession -- i think i'll have to read the curative now.

where i found the book problematic was the way that henry broke up his story into episodes as if he were a novelist. it seemed artificial to me. also jane's letters; they were too literary, not from jane's voice at all, and she wouldn't have broken up her story into convenient plot-propelling chunks. i think charlotte randall intruded too much. but maybe i'm too much in the escapism as opposed to novel-as-artifice camp. also the blank narrator was frustrating, why couldn't we find out more about him if we had to spend so much time with him? Are some people merely audiences? i thought the jane character was great, and i loved the way she said she was composed of rage.

[Merryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was a bit frustrating. It meandered all over the place and was mostly written in the first person, but the narrative switched from character to character with (sometimes) little definition between them - very confusing!

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admire New Zealand author Charlotte Randall’s writing: I was entranced by Hokitika Town (see my review) and wanted to read more of her work so I tracked down The Crocus Hour (2008) via interlibrary loan. I didn’t enjoy it as much as Hokitika Town but I still think she’s a fascinating author and intend to read her other novels: Dead Sea Fruit (1995); The Curative (2000); Within the Kiss (2002); and What Happen Then, Mr Bones? (2004).

The story centres around a rather odd character called Henry David whose daughter Sally has gone missing on the island of Crete some time in the 1980s. The unnamed narrator, a figure so shadowy that at first I thought he was female, meets Henry and becomes first fascinated, and then obsessed by him. On Crete, he spends long hours listening to Henry dissect the story of Sally’s disappearance and he also joins Henry in retracing the frustrating search. He meets Jane, who was travelling with Sally but doesn’t seem to have liked her much. She is unsympathetic to Henry and very tactlessly thinks he should move on. That seems cruel, because the pain of having a missing child must surely be unendurable, and although Randall doesn’t linger over lurid speculations, the reader can’t help but imagine some kind of ghastly fate befalling his daughter.

But Henry is not a character who arouses much sympathy. He is bombastic and opinionated, and he bombards the narrator about the Greek history and culture that he ‘ought to know about’ as if he were a delivering lectures at a university. Quite why the narrator not only puts up with this but ends up trekking across the world to join him on the South Island isn’t clear. I suspected a homosexual attraction, but Henry isn’t gay…

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/11/22/th...