It’s a funny thing about
reading this novel, but towards the end I started to realise that it contained
echoes of other books I’ve been reading this month. There’s the classic
children’s fantasy novel series that the young hipster characters revere and
carry with them into adult life (Fan Girl). There’s the young characters
themselves and their excruciating brightness and cleverness, and their preoccupation
with the way books will outlive us (Fault in Our Stars). And there’s also the
mysterious fellowship of monks holed up in a mysterious Sanctus Sanctorum,
getting up to murky business and keeping an age-old secret that they themselves
don’t fully understand (Sanctus).
As you know, I move
zig-zag-wise through my reading, so little ripples of meaning and ideas ought
to be more or less accidental, or the product of my own overactive imagination.
Plus, in Mr Penumbra’s case, it was a book recommendation from Stuart, and not
a choice that I made via my own intuition.
So, I’m not sure what it
means – or portends! – other than the contemporary novel is obsessing about
things like electronic media, textuality as something you get embroiled in as
an adventure, magical fantasy epics and secrets guarded by corrupt and ancient
cults.
I liked ‘Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookshop’ a great deal. I like most of all the action that takes place in
the tall, narrow bookshop in San Francisco – from the narrator’s early
nightshifts, when he decides something nefarious to do with secret codes is
going on, right up until the ending, when he gives a power-point presentation
to all the characters to explain everything he has learned. There are some
wonderful characters (usually the shady ones – I wasn’t so keen on some of the
show-off prodigies who came centre stage) and some lovely twists to do with
things like computer scanners made out of flat-pack cardboard, complete and
unabridged audiobooks read by the author, museums for knitted pullovers and ubiquitous
fonts.
Everything in this novel is
hiding another secret inside itself, and I liked the journey our hapless-stroke-brilliant
narrator makes on his way to uncovering an ultimately (…spoilers) rather modest
and friendly meaning to it all.
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