Once in a while I read a book that interests me not only because of the subject and the characters and the use of language but also because of the narrative structure. And one narrative structure that I happen to like (some people hate it) is the past/present split.
Testament, written by Alis Hawkins and published in 2008, which I heard about from Cornflower who chose it for her reading club a few months ago, employs such a structure. It takes place both in 1385 when a secular liberal arts college is being built in a fictional third English university town, and in the present when that college is in financial trouble and is threatened with a takeover by a man who wants to make it, in effect, a business school.
The book is what we call a page turner and there is a structural reason for this. The episodes in the past alternate rapidly with those in the present, few of them in either time longer than 15 or 20 pages. And each of these short tableaux ends on a note of suspense. Sometimes it's mild - how will his patron respond to the master mason's blunt statement that he will not compromise his standards for anyone? And sometimes it's graphic and even frightening - what will the mason find at his building site when he hears loud noises and shouting?
The book is so carefully constructed that you almost always have that urge to read one more page as you grow more deeply involved with the brilliant fund raiser who in the present is trying to figure out the meaning of a recently discovered mural and how to exploit it to interest the alumni in the fate of their college, and you anguish with the 14th century woman master carpenter as she tries to convince the people of the city that her son is not cursed.
I give books a score in my database - 1 to 5, based on my enjoyment of the book and on it's literary worth. For example, Kafka usually gets a 3.5 from me because although it's great literature I don't enjoy it at all. Many novels of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope get a full 5 because they meet both criteria. Testament, like the recent Wolf Hall, gets a 5. It's that good. Dont' miss it.
(Photo from Cornflower Books.)