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Rustication
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Recommended to ☯Bettie☯ by: Laura
Read from May 08, 2013 to January 26, 2014
Synopsis: Christmas 1863. Seventeen-year-old Richard Shenstone has been sent down from Cambridge under a cloud of suspicion. Addicted to opium and tormented by disturbing sexual desires, he finds temporary refuge in the creaking old mansion inhabited by his newly impoverished mother and his sister, Effie, whose behaviour grows increasingly bizarre. Threatening letters circulate among the locals, where almost anyone can be considered a suspect in a series of crimes and misdemeanours ranging from vivisection to murder. Fans of Charles Palliser's books, as well as readers of Sarah Waters and Michel Faber, will delight in this, his first new novel in over ten years. Hailed for fiction that is "mesmerizing, meticulous" (Entertainment Weekly), Palliser confirms his reputation as "our leading contemporary Victorian novelist" (The Guardian).
Another blurb: Charles Palliser’s work has been hailed as “so compulsively absorbing that reality disappears” (New York Times). Since his extraordinary debut, The Quincunx, his works have sold over one million copies worldwide. With his new novel, Rustication, he returns to the town of Thurchester, which he evoked so hauntingly in The Unburied.
Rustication:
1. To go to or live in the country
2. Used at Oxford, Cambridge and Durham Universities to mean being sent down
Well, that was a tricksy tale, and the core of Rustication being small town maliciousness, ugly letters and heinous crimes redolent of that within 'Arthur and George'. Not that I need to have a cast of adorables peopling my fiction, however it was odd that there was no-one at all here to cheer for, to get behind. A technically clever novel that was bereft of any heart.
NB - for those who have marked this as horror, it is not.
3* no more, no less
5* Quincunx
4* The Unburied
3* Rustication
3* Betrayals
1* The Sensationist
6