A poetic author tries to be funny and fails wretchedly. Complete hogwash with little plot, subpar characters, and an utter confusion of an ending.
Summary:
American professor Aaron McCloud is a scorned romantic who travels to visit his aunt Kitty in Ireland and bemoan his troubles by the seaside. But his journey of self-pity is put on hold when a herd of pigs derails his course. Through a series of events, he brings one wayward pig home to his aunt. The pig proves a glutton for destruction, and in the coarse of uprooting everything in sight, it unearths a skeleton in the garden. Aaron, Kitty, the hired-hand and family feuding Sweeney, and pig-herder Lolly are thrown into accusations amongst themselves and are determined to find the truth without help of the police before returning the murdered man to the ground.
Verdict: 2/10
Like the character of Kitty, an author who "corrects" classic literature by putting her own spin on it, Caldwell seems to be imitating The Trouble With Harry. The characters happen across a dead body and casually keep it in their guest bedroom and try to hide him from the police while they sort out the truth. But unlike Hitchcock's take on a farcical mystery, Caldwell just seems random and out of his depth.
I know British humor is usually a balance between the witty/dry and the absurd. Caldwell hits both... by fluctuating wildly from poetic soliloquies to characters dancing around a pig in a grave.
Aaron is the only man who goes away to remember a woman instead of forget her. And he can't even do that. It's like the character wants to choose his genre of brooding drama/romance and the author says, 'Nope. We're making this a comedy about a pig.' While that back and forth is somewhat amusing, it still feels forced. The author over-juxataposes everything and loses any sympathy his main man might have received.
Maybe the author is trying to find some deeper symbolism? He refers to how the Irish just accept mystery as part of life and how Aaron's American-ness goes against that grain throughout the story. But he also tries to do something similar with Aaron's over-romanticism vs. the Irish practicality or Aaron's delusional narcissism vs. the humbling reality. It's too much in one character.
And really all the characters have the same trouble. Caldwell includes a family-feud between Kitty and Sweeney, which is only partially explained and easily disregarded in the end. He adds a random bar scene with a dart game that has no bearing on anything. And he adds in a random romance with Lolly who didn't seem to care for Aaron at all until the last 10 pages.
All of that within less than 200 pages would seem rather action-packed, right? Wrong. The novel had so much extra description and pointless narration that it felt double the length in all the wrong ways. Far too drawn out. Oddly even with this short of a book, I still feel like it could have been boiled down to a novella of 60 pages.
But I stuck through it because I wanted to see how it would end. Like Aaron, I needed to know the solution to the mystery. But you can barely call this an ending! [SPOILERS... but not really] Caldwell deliberately denies his reader any closure. Everyone claims to have done it so we'll never know the truth. And then in the last 5 pages, the house bizarrely goes sliding into the sea?! I honestly couldn't tell whether it was all a drunken dream or not. Apparently not because the novel just ends. It made absolutely no sense.
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