SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi: https://t.co/4WaKNNhHUw
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) July 10, 2021
Short Review: 4.5 out of 10
1/3
Short Review (cont): A short novel of literary fiction with a fantastical element featuring Otto and Xavier Shin, two lovers taking a "Honeymoon" on a private train car, one populated by a few with connections to their pasts. Pretty prose, but little else here alas.
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) July 10, 2021
2/3
Peaces is the latest novel by Helen Oyeyemi, a well known author at the very least for her work in literary fiction, one who I had heard of though I had never read. Peaces is a short novel, around 250 pages, dealing with the potentially fantastical - a pair of guys on their kind of honeymoon go on a trip on a train, where they discover some weird things involving a man whose existence is unclear - so I decided to give it a shot, first reserving it in audio from the library back when I was reading audiobooks, and then reserving it in physical copy from my library once I stopped.
I'm not really a literary fiction guy - I tend to not really love books that thrive upon description of what a character is seeing, which is a common literary trope - but even taking that into account, I found Peaces to be more of a mess than anything. The story goes on long divergences early that prevent it from really getting into a rhythm, and once the story does in the latter half start to pull together, it never really coheres into anything that ever made me think something other than "huh?" Like there's some clear ideas and themes here....I think...but they don't actually go in a direction or are handled in a way that actually makes them interesting to think about, and there's very little else in this book to grab hold of.
Otto and Xavier Shin are committed to each other...although not ready quite yet for marriage, so when Xavier's aunt gifts them with a "honeymoon" trip on a sleeper train to get them out of her house, they take their pet mongoose and go. But the train, the Lucky Day, is not a typical one - owned by a reclusive woman Ava and attended to only by two others full time, the train is full of cars that seem to cater to their interests in different and various ways. It should be an idyllic vacation, if nothing else.
But the Lucky Day's other occupants are not normal people and all of them have seemingly coincidental connections to people from both Otto and Xavier's pasts. And so Otto and Xavier must remember those pasts to see how they connect to the stories of the people on this train, in particular to see how they are connected to a mysterious man named Prem....a man who may or may not exist, and who may or may not have set the two of them up on this train for his own purposes.....
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Peaces is a strange book, near entirely narrated by Otto in first person, in that it is throughout its entire page length not interested in giving you a straight forward narrative, or even a disordered narrative that will eventually serve a clear purpose. For example, the book's first chapter takes place 4 years prior to the main narrative and feels so disconnected from the story that at first I wasn't even sure if it was being told by the same protagonist, and only comes back into play some 180 pages later in the novel....except not in a way that actually makes the prologue particularly relevant at all? Like it could be removed in its entirety and practically nothing would change. And this isn't a unique feeling - so in an early part of the book, Xavier goes on a long story digression about his childhood and his encounter on a train as part of it, and while a character from that flashback shows up in the main narrative, her connection to Xavier is never really relevant at all in the main narrative, and the flashback just goes on and on for way way too long, well before the book actually establishes what its main narrative actually is. There is a main plot arc here, but the book takes an awful long time to make that clear, and doesn't seem to do so for any particularly good reason.
That main plot arc is....okay I guess, but never really gets that interesting because it's clearly a puzzle box that Oyeyemi isn't all that interested in answering except with other questions. The main character Otto and Xavier do get character development in their backstories, as do the three other characters (Allegra, Ava, and Laura) and yet all of that character development goes towards the puzzle and their connection to it (the puzzle being: does Prem exist, who is he really, and what does it mean that Ava can't see him?). The result is that none of the characters are really interesting or actually worth caring about (honestly the only character I cared about were the two mongooses and they don't actually talk!), and the book seems way too interested in its descriptions to actually make me care.
And well, that puzzling main plot just eventually, once it starts going, doesn't actually go anywhere. The theme here I think - and its a problem that I'm not fully sure - is about what it means to "unsee" someone, to end a relationship in a way that you remove your memory of them from your mind....except it's not really ever clear where Oyeyemi is trying to go with that, if anywhere. Why are these characters all roped together like this, and what does it mean in how it all concludes? I have honestly no idea. I've seen one review of this book make a similar point but talk about how the book is still worthwhile due to Oyeyemi's beautiful prose, but like, the prose actually has to SAY SOMETHING or who cares how poetic it is?
Not me.
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