Saturday, 25th October 2008

The Great Good Thing

The book I finished a few days ago was The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley. I read this book, which was thankfully thin with a thankfully large print, because I am resuming my campaign to read every book which sits peacefully on my lovely pine shelves. Even though it was about 7 years ago, I remember buying this book from Waterstone’s (or was it Dillons then?). I was just growing into the part where you go to a book shop to browse rather than only purchase the next one in a series; I was just getting into the ‘is this a good book I don’t know well the plot sounds interesting the first page isn’t too dire what the hell lets buy it’ mindset, and so I bought it. The extremely dull cover and lullingly predictable plotline (which seemed much more interesting at the time, I’m sure) kept it on my shelf for the next 7 years.

Obviously, I’m not going to start raving about amazing language or huge scope or anything, simply because this book was written for someone 7 years younger than I, but I actually think I would have enjoyed The Great Good Thing quite a lot if I had read it at the right time; it centres on the life of Sylvie, a princess in a children’s fairytale who lives inside the book and is forced to act out the same scenes, the same chapters, over and over again, every time someone opens her book.

However, this all goes rather wrong when she breaks the unbreakable and looks at the Reader, crossing over from the world of her story to the world of the Reader’s dreams. Then we get hurtled into a totally bizarre, sometimes so over-simplified for children that to a 15 year old it’s incredibly complicated, situtation whereby the characters of Sylvie’s story are forced to move into the Reader’s dream world permanently, turning up every now and then and effectively forcing her to dream about them. But as time goes, the Reader begins to forget Sylvie and her friends, so they begin to rust and are forced to move into the Reader’s memory. This sounds very complicated and it is (I think the most confusing part of all is that while the book is closed, the characters are free to roam the chapters and hang out in any scene they wish…but as soon as the Reader returns, they are forced to hurtle back to page 3 and begin reciting their lines all over again…)

However, as long as you’re not me (ie, as long as you don’t think about it too much), it’s all rather simple and it kept me entertained for a couple of days. Well. Entertained in the sense that it kept me occupied, not much else. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, it just did nothing for me. Oh well!