Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
[...] so then the question became how well it worked as a fable.
Not very well, for me. I thought the framework was too slight for the weighty issues it purports to raise. It was lazy. If the author has nothing to say and no vision to impart, then the reader has to do too much of the work. This didn't grab me sufficiently to make it worth my while. [...]
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My own reaction to the book I found a little surprising. There is a lot about this book that I would have expected to find annoying and unfulfilling, but for some reason it all worked for me. Now I find myself looking for reasons why.
As you've seen, I've come up with many ways to fill out the technical background. I don't recall trying to do that while I was reading, but apparently the lack didn't jar too heavily on me. I think, in the beginning, I just assumed that background would be filled in as we went on. As the story progressed I became fascinated by the steady and relentless revelation of the context surrounding the three protagonists, and became invested in that as a fait accompli, so that by the time I reached the end the technical justifications for the context just didn't matter any more.
If I had not become invested in the story as I did, I imagine that I would have come away with much the same reaction I see from others here, and think that the author had been too lazy to construct a credible framework. But it did work for me, so there seems nothing lazy about it. Subtle yes, and still not clear in my head despite knowing that it had an impact on me, but definitely not lazy.
Again I am struck by the different ways we react to different books. To me,
Dandelion Wine seemed lazy, the author just pushing his short stories together and hoping people would accept it as a novel, but others got caught up in a feeling generated by his writing. Here it turns around, and I'm the one that got caught up enough not to care about the flaws - I can see them, but they just don't matter to me.