"The aftertaste you leave with a reader is more
important than the first and immediate last impressions if you want to have the
reader coming back for more."
- Me while thinking about By the time you read this.
By the time you read this, by Giles Blunt, is a
mystery-crime fiction novel that managed to get "the Best Mystery of the
Year"-name/award by the Globe&Mail. I've never read any other novels
by Blunt, but apparently his "Forty words of sorrow" was some kind of
award winner also.
The story opens up with a description of a town (or some
kind of area, maybe it was a small city even) called Algonquin Bay. The readers are immediately assured that
nothing bad could ever happen in Algonquin Bay, which ofcourse means the
complete opposite: something terrible must be on its way. On a second thought,
though, after finishing the book, since the antagonist/villain had been
wreaking havoc from the shadows for two long years, that particular opening
statement about the town makes little sense.
John Cardinal is our main protagonist. He's a very
experiences and skilled policeman out of suit who on paper comes out to be sort
of a Gary Stu (praised to high heavens by the author and story's characters),
but the twist in the story is that Cardinal is the one who all terrible things
happen to, and he's left mentally exhausted, left to question himself about
"what good is it to keep on living" as very early on in the story
John Cardinal's wife, the beautiful and perfect Catherine dies by what is considered
to be a certain suicide. That's what I as a reader also believed - and hoped -
to have been the case, atleast until the ending portion kicked in where
everything sort of gets explained... And I can't say that things were explained
in a "good" way, really.
Giles Blunt is an excellent writer when it comes to
expressing how things would look like in order to create the imaginery for the
reader, he's also great in atmospheric build-up, realistic writing and grammar.
However the story felt too in-my-face realistic when it came to spending my
time in telling how even the smallest things seemed and were like - truly alot
of trivial things in the text - that I just couldn't keep myself invested. At
times it felt as if I was doing homework, in other words it was exhausting to
read. Also in this story Blunt seems to fall short in having any sort of
imagination required to tell a compelling fictional story, as By the time you
read this had a guidebook crime drama plot and story. The whole story was
uninspired to no end, side plotlines (well, the only one there was) were
handled in a boring manner while Blunt tried to present them as something huge
and special, he failed in executing the promises. He failed reaching up to
those standards he himself set for the story. There was nothing much going on
in the story either as I spent hours trying to get through it.
After John Cardinal leaves a plotline with the Algonquin
Bay's mayor's adultery investigation hanging (never to be continued again in
the story. This is the first thing that happens after the opening segment,
also),Cardinal gets a notice while on a stakeout with the mayor that a woman
has jumped off a 10-story building to her death. When Cardinal arrives to the
crime scene, he immediately goes to grab the woman with broken bones and holds
her - a moment which may or may not make the reader feel some form of emotion.
I didn't feel a thing, not because of its amazing plot weaving (which it didn't
have) or just because of the fast pacing and skipped character fleshing out in
order to get to that point but because of the unnatural amount of
hard-to-understand words that Blunt filled the text with in order to build up
atmosphere - words that someone who doesn't have english as their first or
second mother language may find frustrating trying to decipher. The alien words
used weren't what made the story fristrating for me however.
After Cardinal finds his dead wife - soon after the story
begins - the story falls into a downward spiral
Aside from the less than memorable characters, the only ones
who I could remember while reading, I could probably count with one hand. The
MC, John and his wife and their emotional support daughter Kelly who didn't
really have any personality going for her, Lise Delorme - John's perfect
colleague, the antagonist who brings another layer of weird writing into the
story. The antagonist is hailed, by award giving groups, to be on par with
Hannibal Lecter's tier of great villainous characters and... Not even
close. The story is filled with somewhat
annoying coincidences in the plotlines that it'd be arguably better without the
antagonist, but another problem in the story makes me regret saying that, that
problem being pacing.
As I mentioned previously, the story takes a dive not soon
after it begins, and most of it has to do with the lack of any interesting or
entertaining characters with quirks or interesting and suspensful plotlines.
Everything is so blank, depressing in a boring way. The story consists of John
Cardinal and his daughter Kelly trying to deal with Catherine's death and
depression.
John Cardinal is on leave from work at the PD where the 2nd most important character of the story, Lise Delorme, is trying to crack an old case about a sexual predator. The side plotline is handled in a pretty lackluster way and it doesn't leave any type of taste with the reader, it's just Delorme going around talking with people to get hints at who the guy could be, and the guy just happens to be indirectly connected to the main antagonist, in other words it's unnecessarily mixed in with the main plot. Anyways, as Cardinal tries to find a good coffin for his late wife and also a strange guy who sends him threatening letters regarding Cardinal failing to protect Catherine, the reader will spend a good 200 pages reading rather empty text that, aside from atmosphere, doesn't build-up to anything in the long run. The writing oversaturated the story with trying to tell how things are like. The characters weren't that great either as I previously mentioned, so reading so much "meh" slice-of-life about them did not do the story any favours. The drama in the story also felt like it was some kind of crime-drama trope that was being used.
Most of the enjoyment I remember getting while reading came from trying to guess what will happen next in the story (though that would mean that something actually happens which really isn't the case in this book), and then after dozens of pages of nothing happening, the thing that I had guessed would happen, happens, that's when I just laughed at how stupid the whole thing seemed like.
Last notes.
The chapters were nicely short, easy to read to a "checkpoint."The story was unnecessarily left open-ended, but not in a good way. It felt like the author got bored with the story, tried explaining things while forgetting to give closure to things, and just wrote that it's over here and everything is good.
The last dozen or two dozen pages of the book is a taste read of Giles Blunt's next book. The genre seemed to be completely different and the characters seemed to actually have some life to them, despite seemingly being archetypal characters with quirks. Atleast they were noticeably more lively compared to the characters in the main story of the book.
