Dec 26, 2021
Hullo.
I can definitely see a bit of the experimental nature of things here, so I would like to being by issuing a congratulation for trying to get out of your comfort zone. There were some poetic bits and the narrative voice reads a lot like the Noir/true crime films, particularly with those short, sparse and humdrum sentences, which I assume was what you were going for.
Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that everything is written like a mechanism. There's a lack of flow to things, as far as I'm concerned. I can appreciate you use some form of imagism, rather obvious in the descriptions, but I feel that particular style is kind of lacking when not properly adopted. Many times I felt like paragraphs were missing a wheel or two and you just replaced it with a pile of bricks – 'Letters of love and forgiveness don't fly through the mail like swans delivering bundles of hope.' The aforementioned constructions, these almost intransigent similes create a very monotonous reading experience, which doesn't necessarily translate into the monotony you might want to impart through the text itself (i.e. how Daniel's door was just one of many unoiled cogs in this machine).
The poetic aspects are there, I'll grant you that. There's a lot of reflection around this extremely dilapidated, Hell's kitchen wannabe setting about the human nature, particularly greed, isolation and anguish. However, I feel like you're putting these sort of episodes above the storytelling itself. I personally enjoy it more when the reflection is mingled with the plot moving forward (primarily) not when the plot is paused so that the narrative voice can issue declarations. When it happens much too often you end up with a very slow, meandering scene that, whilst titillating to the meditation gurus, to me is just nondescript. Notwithstanding that, there is, I feel, an unspoken limit to how much you can say with one singular thing before the whole thing starts feeling loaded, tacked on or inordinate. In this one short chapter you tackle what I can assume is environmental concerns (fracking), bleak quotidian life, claustration, the downtrodden neighbourhoods of capitalism, crime and its tolls on people and certainly some other things I haven't listed. This isn't to say that it's wrong, but to me it feels like these things are there just to be there, put forward in a very broad, unassuming way with a very low purpose.
At any rate, it's a step-up, so I'm interested to see where the wind blow Daniel. See you next chapter.
Bubs, out.
