I took a brief run at this one a few years ago, because I had
heard it was one of Burke's best, but I couldn't get anywhere
with it. I thought it might be a too-much-backstory thing and
resolved to try again with the first in the series ("Heaven's
Prisoners" I think?) but haven't gotten back to it. I'm not a
big fan of the overdescription thing, especially when it's of
nature and not, say, a neighborhood in a city where the
landscape says something important about the inhabitants; I
mean, OK, I can kind of dig those wheat-threshing chapters in
"Anna Karenina" but most writers aren't Tolstoy. A poet
friend of mine calls this kind of stuff "gratuitous scenery"
and tends to make big X's through it in her paperbacks - I
don't go that far but I don't often find these passages
interesting. Probably one of the things that slowed the Burke
book down for me.
Carrie
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