Going Up Or Going Down? (The Hundred and Ninety-nine Steps - Michel Faber)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	The Hundred and Ninety-nine Steps - Michel Faber
Date:	17/03/03 (150 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: looks good

Disadvantages: isn't too good

Do you know what a 'book on demand' is? If you‘ve got the title of a book which has been out of print for a while or a manuscript of your own which all the publishers you‘ve sent it to have rejected, but you feel you must see in print, then you can turn to a publishing enterprise on the net and have the book printed.

When I opened Michel Faber‘s 'The Hundred and Ninety-Nine-Steps', I learnt that the term can have a second meaning. "This book exists because Keith Wilson, Artist in Residence at Whitby Abbey during summer 2000, asked me to come and write a short story inspired by the English heritage dig." If that was a singular event or if Mr Faber can be booked is something I don‘t know.

Although Faber was invited to write a short story, what he has written is a novella, a prose form not often found in the English literature. What is it? Well, it‘s a piece of prose longer than a short story and shorter than a novel, between 30 000 and 50 000 words long.

I came across the title browsing through amazon, the synopsis sounded as if the book might be interesting: "Sian, tired of nightmares in which she meets a grisly end, decides she needs to get out more. Joining an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey, she uncovers a mystery involving a long-hidden murder. Faber's novella is in turn thriller, romance, ghost story and meditation on the nature of sincerity."

The first sentence, "The hand caressing her cheek was gentle but disquietingly large..." leads us into a murderous scene culminating in the sentence, "Her scream was gagged by the blade slicing deep into her throat, severing everything right through the bone of her spine...". Sounds promising, doesn‘t it?

The third paragraph, though, wakes not only Sian up "Bolt upright in bed, Sian clutched her head in her hands, expecting it to be lolling loose from her neck...".
This, dear author, i.e. the selling of dreams/nightmares as descriptions of realistic events is one of the cheapest tricks and deserves a thumbs-down!

The whole nightmare business is rather odd. We hear that Sian suffered from a recurring nightmare for some time in which her life was endangered, but since she‘s in Whitby she dreams that she‘s killed. So much room is given to this subject, several nightmares are retold in gory detail that we can expect a psychological explanation for them, but no, no reason, no explanation is ever given.

On page 92 (out of 116) we read that Sian doesn‘t have nightmares any more. Hooray, we‘re glad for her! What has saved her? Getting pissed until 'toxic fumes (are) rising from her body' has! The nightmares are not motivated by any goings-on in the novella, are not integrated into the plot, and when they don‘t serve any more, they‘re drowned in alcohol. If that isn‘t odd indeed.

Before coming to Whitby Sian was badly wounded in Bosnia. In Bosnia! It‘s not just a place name any more, it stands for something, just think 'Bosnia' for some seconds and your mind will become active. The author must have relied on this, he lets the readers do the thinking, find allusions, invent a story, he doesn‘t use or exploit the place for the story, what happened to Sian could have happened anywhere, why, even in Nether-Piddleton-on-the-Marshes, but Bosnia sounds more interesting, topical, political, exotic, dangerous, more everything.

Sian does a lot of walking does she and one day she meets a jogger and his dog, a Finnish Lapphund, oh yes! Why not a poodle/dachshund/terrier? Same reasons as with Bosnia if you ask me, just sounds better. According to the critic of The Guardian 'the most plausible characterisation belongs to the dog.' The owner of 'Hadrian' is an attractive young doctor from London who‘s in Whitby on famil
y business. Will something come out of the encounter?

The novella is told in the third-person perspective, the narrator creeps into the main character‘s thoughts, we get her point of view on things. By doing this the author makes us develop sympathy for her - at least this is what this writing method normally does, a brilliant author can make us feel even with a character we would normally loathe.

Yet, try as I may I don‘t like Sian, I think she‘s a silly cow and the young man she meets, snaps at, orders around, rebukes and reprimands is much too good for her! We‘re more or less told by her to find him shallow, superficial, hollow. Ha, I think he‘s great, he looks good, is intelligent, funny, witty, good-humoured, friendly, what more does a woman want?

The reviewers on amazon are all 5-star-enthusiasts, one of them mentions in a half sentence that the book got a bad review in the Times Literary Supplement, something he can‘t understand. Having finished reading I tried to find this review, but the TLS is for subscribers only. I don‘t earn enough on dooyoo to be able to subscribe to the TLS, well, to tell you the truth, even if I had the money I wouldn‘t, I write the reviews I want to read myself, but it would be nice to compare notes. Can anyone help me here?

So it‘s only *down* the Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps? No, not really. There‘s a bench in the middle on which Sian rests on her way to and from the dig in the graveyard of the Abbey, we can put the book there, too, with 2 1/2 stars. What pulls it *up* is the description of the archaeological site and above all Sian‘s work on an old manuscript she gets from the young doctor, she‘s a trained paper conservator and manages to bring to light the fascinating confession a killer wrote on his death-bed more than 200 years ago.

And then the book looks nice, 6.99 GBP (Canongate) for 116 pages is a shame
, but I‘m sure it sells well in Whitby, it just says, "Buy me as a present!" Not a convincing argument for a literary critic, I know, but I don‘t want to finish too negatively.

Why not? Maybe old age softness setting in?

Summary: