Over the weekend I finished reading “The Manual of Detection” by Jedediah Berry, his debut novel.
From Publishers Weekly via Amazon.Com, per usual, here is the description:
Set in an unnamed city …… Charles Unwin, a clerk who’s toiled for years for the Pinkerton-like Agency, has meticulously catalogued the legendary cases of sleuth Travis Sivart. When Sivart disappears, Unwin, who’s inexplicably promoted to the rank of detective, goes in search of him. While exploring the upper reaches of the Agency’s labyrinthine headquarters, the paper pusher stumbles on a corpse. Aided by a narcoleptic assistant, he enters a surreal landscape where all the alarm clocks have been stolen. In the course of his inquiries, Unwin is shattered to realize that some of Sivart’s greatest triumphs were empty ones, that his hero didn’t always come up with the correct solution.
One thing that I left out of the above review was this following statement:
… Berry’s ambitious debut reverberates with echoes of Kafka and Paul Auster.
Probably a good comparison. The novel has a many things going for it though that it shouldn’t be pigeon-holed into just being like these two authors. It’s a good mystery alone from what is lurking behind the shadows to make the story more involved and strange.
The story seems to go through a very dreamlike state, and that’s when the characters are awake. There are times when they are sleep walking, or caught up and surrounded by those that are. This was something that I didn’t expect and ultimately had me struggling to get through it. Maybe some of that was due to the slow pace at times of the story. It lent more to a surreal feeling, maybe better said, and my fondness for that is usually low.
Jedediah Berry
Now, that’s now to say it was a bad novel. Not at all. The concept was excellent. Some of the characters were enigmatic. Some of them were dark and mysterious. Some were just outright weird. The setting, without a real feel of time and place gave it real appeal. And Berry’s prose and style worked very well with what he created. There’s talent here. There is some really good stuff. Some sections were nearly brilliant. But overall my feeling is that it fell a bit flat.
Kudos though to Berry and those that came up with the layout of the book for being creative. “The Manual of Detection” is exactly that for the Agency. It is described that it looks just like the hardcover edition of this novel (which is without a dust jacket to give it a more authentic look). There are references to a certain page number and it falls into place in the story, as well as the number of chapters and their significance. Again, this shows the strong ideas that made this quite a debut novel.
Though I have mixed feelings of this novel, I think Berry is one to watch in the future, and I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to read his next outing.
Recent Comments