Month: April 2022

I enjoyed this book, but it didn’t blow me away the way I was hoping and expecting it to. Isn’t it often the way that whenever you have high expectations of a book or a movie, you build it up in a way it can never possibly deliver, leading to an inevitable degree of disappointment?

The premise, of cloning humans for organ donation, is deep, disturbing, and depressing. The book is light, sad, and also extremely depressing.

What I liked.

It is a thoughtful, easy read.

It feels simple and superficial, but it isn’t at all. The plot, the characters, their conversations, and their actions all sit at the top of a bubbling mass of nightmarish complexity and confusion. I’m not at all sure that even the characters themselves understand what they are feeling and why most of the time. Possibly not any of the time.

The book is heavy with sorrowful metaphors and symbolism, not least in Hailsham itself, which is, both literally and physically, the only family that Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth will ever have, and it too is revealed to be less solid than it first appears.

I liked Kathy and Tommy for their loyalty, naivety, and honesty but not nearly as much as I disliked Ruth for her controlling and manipulative exploitation of them.

I liked the way that because the characters lived such small, unnatural, and sheltered lives they were highly sensitive to little things. Tiny interactions were hugely important and meaningful to them. Small conversations and statements were huge and provoked much angst and analysis and yet they never seemed to address the enormous issues that were staring them in the face every minute of every day.

What I didn’t like.

I really didn’t like Ruth.

I was frustrated by the passive resignation of the characters to their fate. I found myself wondering why Kathy and Tommy didn’t just run away. But I think I also understood that they had been raised and conditioned not to expect anything else from life.

The interaction at the end of the book with Madame and Emily was weird. It was confusing and almost contrived in the way it tried to answer many of the questions that ran through the book. It felt awkward and clunky to me and left me with a lot of unanswered questions still remaining.

I always find stories about time travel extremely confusing, and Lightning was no exception to this. Half the time I had no idea who was traveling to where and when, or why they were doing so. Nevertheless, my confusion did not spoil my enjoyment of what was essentially a good story. What helped a lot, was Laura’s nine-year-old son Chris’s, exposition about the “paradoxes” of time travel. Whenever I came to a part that was particularly perplexing for my poor old brain to grapple with, I’d just (like the characters) put it down to a time travel paradox and leave it at that.

What I liked.

Lightning is a light, fast-paced, easy read.

It contained some pleasing characters – I particularly liked Laura’s best friend from childhood, Thelma.

I loved the epic-ness of the story that follows Laura’s life from her birth well into adulthood and links in to some real historical events. It also contains some truly audacious plot twists and turns with Stefan meeting some very interesting historical characters and getting involved in some very well-known historical events, in the course of his time travels.

Mr Koontz skilfully created lots of questions and intrigue throughout the first half of the book that compelled me to read on to find out what it was all about.

When the truth was eventually revealed I was not disappointed. So often “big” sci-fi stories like this start well but lead to dissatisfying conclusions.

I liked the way the story shifted between interdependent events occurring in different time zones making some sections very tense and exciting.

What I didn’t like.

As a writer myself, with nowhere near the level of success as Mr Koontz, I was surprised by how “overwritten” the book was. I only mention this because I am constantly trying to avoid falling into this trap myself. I spend many hours poring over my work removing superfluous words and phrases and avoiding telling the reader things that they already know, or that would be perfectly obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence. Mr Koontz, on the other hand, frequently over-describes scenes and settings, uses extra words that add nothing to the text, and repeatedly explains things that I already knew. The difference between Mr Koontz and I, I suppose, is that as a writer of some repute, he can get away with it and I can’t.

Sometimes the plot was a tad cheesy and unbelievable. It was very handy and let’s face it, naff and highly unlikely, that two girls who grew up in the care system should both become famous and successful multi-millionaires. It was very convenient that Laura, as part of her research as an author, had learned how to gain access to military standard weaponry and knew how to obtain high quality fake identification documents.

I don’t want to create any spoilers here, and life didn’t work out so well for all the characters, but let’s just say, generally, there was a bit of a “happy-ever-after” feel to the book that left me a little dissatisfied.