...you’re gripped exactly as you would be by a movie. You’re racing along on the shoulder of the motorcyclist, you’re listening to the music spill out of the club, you’re watching the cigarette butt arc down from the terrace to the cobbles in a shower of sparks. At the same time, something about the way Thomson paces the action, his phrasing and timing, his management of scale and grain...lets you know that in Katherine Carlyle you’re getting something more than a thriller.
...years of experience find expression in poised and crystalline prose that piles lovely sentence atop lovely sentence. The spare language doesn’t call undue attention to itself until the rushed ending, the extreme brutality of which suggests that Kit would have been better off staying at home. That’s unfortunate. Nevertheless, Katherine Carlyle is a substantial novel, a story told with authority about a bold woman who in abrogating some of her many privileges hopes to find new meaning for her young life.
This is a stunning, thought-provoking novel about a young woman out to prove that she is not 'a freak, an experiment' but vibrant and alive. We should read it and then read everything else by this very fine writer.
Thomson’s chilly style doesn’t quite gel with the high price Katherine pays for her hard-won epiphany, which feels a bit simplistic after all that’s come before. Still, after he draws us skillfully into Katherine’s mysterious quest, he renders us unable to look away.
Rupert Thomson’s prose is gracefully crafted; it’s a transfixing, intriguing adventure; and by the end, you’re still not quite sure what happened or what was the point.
