Liar, Justine Larbalestier
Nov. 9th, 2010 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraMicah is a young black woman at high school in New York, an habitual liar, and the first person narrator of this book. Which is a mixture of truth and lies; which is which, or which if anything is true, is up to the reader.
I’m not a massive fan of unreliable narrators. Probably my favourite, though, is Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a book which keeps revealing new layers of meaning and narrative every time you think you’ve dug through to what “really” happened. Liar didn’t do that for me, and so I enjoyed the pacing and the world while not being really moved by the story, because every time I got attached to anything I’d get told it wasn’t true. Which might, or might not be true – there’s no external validity to anything. And so it’s more of a mental exercise in belief and interpretation, which is a perfectly valid way to do a book, but not something I’d really want to re-read. I think what’s different in Pale Fire is partly structural, partly the sense of play, partly the fact that there’s more of a chance to build your own story – with Liar, you can choose to believe or not, but the possible choices are less complex. Truth or lie? At university or in a less escapable institution? Werewolf or mentally ill? Who killed Zach? Did Jordan exist? I like the hints about less obvious narratives - why is there a trial? - but the trouble is that questioning reality just starts knocking down anything else that supports the novel, and the trick of fiction - believing things that aren't real - starts to wobble. While this may be the point, it makes it counterproductive to read it.
Anyway. Pontifications aside, this is also a werewolf novel, and possibly that’s the problem I have with it, because if I’d read it ten years ago it would have been new and exciting, and now it’s very hard to get past my “oh look, another supernatural YA” block. I think it’s well put-together, I like the cast of characters and I like the pacing; but I end up feeling distanced from Micah, rather than entranced.
I’m not a massive fan of unreliable narrators. Probably my favourite, though, is Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a book which keeps revealing new layers of meaning and narrative every time you think you’ve dug through to what “really” happened. Liar didn’t do that for me, and so I enjoyed the pacing and the world while not being really moved by the story, because every time I got attached to anything I’d get told it wasn’t true. Which might, or might not be true – there’s no external validity to anything. And so it’s more of a mental exercise in belief and interpretation, which is a perfectly valid way to do a book, but not something I’d really want to re-read. I think what’s different in Pale Fire is partly structural, partly the sense of play, partly the fact that there’s more of a chance to build your own story – with Liar, you can choose to believe or not, but the possible choices are less complex. Truth or lie? At university or in a less escapable institution? Werewolf or mentally ill? Who killed Zach? Did Jordan exist? I like the hints about less obvious narratives - why is there a trial? - but the trouble is that questioning reality just starts knocking down anything else that supports the novel, and the trick of fiction - believing things that aren't real - starts to wobble. While this may be the point, it makes it counterproductive to read it.
Anyway. Pontifications aside, this is also a werewolf novel, and possibly that’s the problem I have with it, because if I’d read it ten years ago it would have been new and exciting, and now it’s very hard to get past my “oh look, another supernatural YA” block. I think it’s well put-together, I like the cast of characters and I like the pacing; but I end up feeling distanced from Micah, rather than entranced.
