By Adam Kirkbride
Current student Adam takes a look at the novel behind this year’s 2018 Big City Read Festival, Matthew Haig’s The Radleys. Spoiler warning: Adam isn’t a fan. If you enjoyed the novel and would like to write your own review, do be in touch!
After observing the author’s splenetic and antagonistic output on Twitter, my expectations of Matt Haig’s novel The Radleys were not overwhelmingly optimistic. Despite this, I tried desperately not to judge the novel before I had given it a fair read. After all, it was for the set text for the Big City Read for 2018, a part of one of my first semester modules, and Haig was an honorary graduate at this year’s beautiful graduation ceremony.
Surely, it couldn’t be that bad.
Suffice to say, this small hope was sorely mistaken; not only did I find the novel frustratingly melodramatic and entirely predictable, but it somehow managed to be a perfect example of the cliché idea that everyone can write a novel. As a writer, you may expect that I would find that sentiment reassuring, but more than anything else, I find it disappointing.
Yes, everyone can write a novel nowadays, but that does not mean that everyone should.
The Radleys has a fairly basic and unoriginal premise for the time it was written: a family of vampires attempting to live within society without anyone finding out that they are vampires (god knows how they manage to keep this secret for so long, considering that the novel has as much subtlety as a desert does water). That’s it, that’s the entire novel. Even more disappointing than the lack of interesting plot and character was that it didn’t even manage to keep the twist secret for more than the first two chapters. It had one thing to do right, and it failed miserably.
One of the marks of a good novel, in my opinion, is that it must be unpicked. When a text is over three hundred pages long, the reader does not need to know every bit of information within the first five minutes of reading, and if an author is determined to give the reader the key information early on, then they should at least own the exposition and present it as exposition. Haig fails to do either of these well, instead opting for an awkward middle ground where the reader is forced to pretend they don’t know the twist in a futile effort to prevent the novel from becoming unbearably boring.
At a push, I truly believe that I could get past that predictability if I had to, if the novel had substance beyond the basic idea of vampirism. After all, there are several amazing pieces of literature that reveal key plot points within the first few pages, and yet still manage to move me and make for excellent reading (for example, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, and Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, both of which use the exposition of the twist to their advantage in terms of narrative voice and structure).
However, I would argue that the novel only gets worse with analysis, the main reason being that trying to analyse this novel is as painful as trying to avoid the realisation that the Radleys are vampires. Theoretically, Haig’s use of the iconic gothic figure of the vampire opens the door to several potential interpretations and allegorical readings of the novel as a narrative of isolation, contagion, sexual shame, notoriety, or even ageing. Each one of these interpretations was hinted at briefly in the novel, and it was easy to see how one could read certain moments in these ways as the vampires struggle to come to the realisation and slow acceptance of who they are, but not one of these possible allegories are sustained in the longer narrative.
Haig constantly teases the reader with potential for substance only to yank it away at the last second. I am a firm believer in the idea that readers move a text fr mediocre to high quality; how can this text ever be more than exceptionally average when the reader is given nothing to work with?
Perhaps I was harsh earlier suggesting that this novel is a perfect example of why not everyone should write a novel, but I do believe it is a perfect example of an increasing trend of modern novels relying solely on other people’s plot lines popular at the time that the novel is written. Moreover, it is not only Haig who is guilty of this surface writing. One of the main reasons I now find fantasy novels more difficult to read than I did when I was younger is the realisation that they are largely identical in terms of plot, setting, and character.
I understand why these novels sell.
Familiarity is comforting, like a childhood teddy bear.
But there is a time and a place for comforting familiarity, just like anything else. Constantly needing to cling onto familiarity will rarely impress or result in anything memorable, just as bringing a teddy bear into a business meeting rather than leaving it at home would be entirely inappropriate. Unfortunately, while this novel (and this style of writing) is not completely unbearable in the grand scheme of things, it will always leave me disappointed and feeling that the reader deserves more than they have been given.