Five Stars to ‘Unravelling Oliver’ by Liz Nugent
Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was hugely impressed by this. Hard to believe it’s a first novel. If you’d asked me before I started whether I thought a novel with ten different first person points of view was a good idea I would have said no. But Liz Nugent has pulled it off not just convincingly, but with real panache. My only issue was with Eugene’s chapter, which I personally felt should not have been included in this novel – but then our family situation is such that anything to do with mental handicaps/diminished skills is a major hot button issue for me. If it doesn’t ring perfectly true, then I am perhaps unreasonably sensitive about it.
I’m not surprised this has been a prize winning novel, but I am surprised not to have heard more about it here in the UK. It seems to me that Ms Nugent really has delivered something for everyone here, and she’s done it by calling on, and fully inhabiting such a diverse range of ‘witnesses’ to the horrific crime which occurs in the opening chapter. At times, we are in high John Banville territory (Oliver is not unlike Freddy, in The Book of Evidence) and there is a disastrous weekend away that’s completely hilarious, and heartbreaking, and still other sequences, also with very dark things going on, yet set against a backdrop of that imaginary France-as-bucolic-idyll of Joanne Harris.
What makes it seems so real, is that no one person knows all of the story. So they are unaware that when they are telling you what to them seems a light anecdote, they are unwittingly lobbing in a new detail or twist, which renders their evidence much darker.
I hate spoilers, so I won’t deliver any here. But I wanted to say that in several places, where I felt lulled into thinking I knew what was coming, I felt my eyebrows suddenly shooting up off the top of my head. And I do love it when all the signs of a twist have been hidden in plain sight but I missed them. I really love that actually.
So – a rambling review, all to say, read the opening chapter of this online, and see if you can avoid buying it. I doubt you can. But I think you’ll like it.
