The maid needs a couple more hours to disinfect the room. (Now I’m playing JB’s game, not telling you.) Tristan has to bide his time in town for a while. I assumed that the previous lodger may have died in the room but I was wrong.
Cantwell and her son David don’t want to say what the problem was.
His room is not quite ready because of some unpleasantness with the previous lodger. He’s about 21 when the story opens but will be an older man facing catastrophe by the time of the story’s ending. Tristan Sadler is a young man who works for a publisher in London. In this case, we are in early 20th century Norwich. You arrive in a town and encounter a difficulty with the reservation at your hotel. The Absolutist starts with an experience I bet we’ve all had. In the end the pipe ruptures and, in a gush of significance, you are engulfed. But the backstory is hellish and slow-dripped into the text. My comfort zone was expansive in the opening pages of the novel. The story out front is conventional and reassures the reader. There is also a different order of magnitude contrasting the front-story from the flashbacks. Then you want to read more to regain your balance.īoyne supplies the missing information in flashbacks and he is very skilled in parsing them out. When you sense that something’s not quite right with the narrative arc, like you are on a bridge that you suddenly realize may tip over to one side, this induces a feeling of vertigo. But you may not even sense that something you need to know is missing. You need to know that earlier story to understand what’s happening in the now of the novel. It’s as if there has already been a story before JB has started his story. When I started The Absolutist by John Boyne I had little idea of what I was getting myself into. Protect your brain! Don’t read anything! You might be affected….infected! Sigh… They may have physical courage in some cases, but are afraid for their brains. That’s why anti-intellectuals hate books so, and hate reading. That’s a different kind of courage than physical courage.
Reading a book takes a bravery of the mind. Even if it’s a rereading, you won’t be reading the same book…that is, if it’s a good book. You can never be sure what you are going to encounter. It takes a measure of bravery to read a book.
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