Status Updates From A Dram of Poison

The last half left me dazed. Suddenly, I went from a doom-laden, oppressive, hard to keep reading book to a novelisation of a Bernard Shaw play of ideas, filled to the brim with optimism, wit, friendship and a determination to overcome adversity.
I liked the second half much better but it was such a surprise, it took me a while to adjust to what was happening.

Like Gibson himself, the prose keeps emotions at arms length, denying them a voice, while letting the imagination see clearly how circumstances have changed, dreams have been lost and bleak futures ushered in.

I hadn't liked Gibson much when he was in rescue mode. Now I feel sorry for him as he starts to see himself becoming an old cripple leading a life he didn't choose and harbouring resentments he can't voice.

I love the delicacy with which this captures shifting moods and emotions and startling moments of reassessement.

The content feels very odd to me. Our hero treats his 'wife' like a dog he's rescued from the pound and nursed back to health. There's no malice in it but there's no understanding either. I have to remind myself that he was born in 1900, has lived alone for decades and has almost no experience of women.

The storytelling has an odd distance to it. It feels like the kind of account that I'd have expected 50 years earlier from Wharton or James.

This starts like 'The Great American Novel' rather than a crime novella - the life of a man evoked with skill a a modicum of lyricism in just a few pages so that we know who he is at 55 and who he would probably have continued to be had he not met a young woman at her father's funeral.

I think that promises a lot.