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Avoid Oxford
Sunday, January 30, 2022 19:51
I just completed reading the second¹ most disappointing² novel I ever read.
The opening pages of Stephen Fry's The Liar and Neal Stephenson got me by page 9 with the Riemann Zeta function in his Cryptonomicon, I knew in an instant that I would crave re-reading these books. So was my expectation from the opening chapters of Julia Whelan's My Oxford Year.
Not my genre but I can tolerate a bit of frivolous romance. But when the lead character makes that unannounced visit, the novel makes such a sharp turn that I got whiplash from the narrative shift from a charmingly predictable fluff to a predictably tragic drama. I am less bothered by the bait-'n'-switch from comedy to tragedy and I held vacuous insouciant concern for the characters, the real heartbreak is after the revelation scene all the charming aspects from the front end that sucked me into the book just . . . evaporated.
The red herrings introduced were either entirely irrelevant or totally inconsequential.
I am being neither stoic nor callous thinking the predictable decision made the character seem immature. A case of amor caecat omnia.
At the risk making a Harvard comparison, "Love Story" has greater emotional resonance and knowing the plot spoiler adds weight to the emotional impact.
I give 2 stars out of 5 since I finished the book, if only to prove how correct I was about the predictable end.
1 Waugh's Brideshead Revisited was the first
2 Definition
disappointment -- the state or condition in which expectations were suppressed, subverted, or unfulfilled