The String Diaries
By Stephen Lloyd Jones
(Mulholland Books)
If there’s one thing I hate as a critic, it’s dancing around the possibility of giving too much away in a review. Spoilers are called that for a reason, and critics despise them every bit as much as readers do.
Writers, though ― crafty little devils ― seem determined to concoct spoiler-bait books, titles that are just nigh on impossible to discuss. Which is precisely why this review is so short. Like recent favorites “Gone Girl” and “The Quick,” it’s hard to discuss Stephen Lloyd Jones’ “The String Diaries” without revealing too much.
This is a book of authorial wizardry, as Jones hopscotches among three time periods and locales (late 1800s Hungary; 1970s France and England; and present-day Snowdonia, in northern Wales) with grace, wit and dexterity.
“The String Diaries” involves a partially human creature who develops a lust for a certain human woman and ends up pursuing her look-alike descendants through the centuries. How he does that is a marvel, a new take on a genre that one would have thought completely bled dry of new ideas by now. If you want a clue, go Google the translation for the Hungarian “hosszu elet,” but that’s all you’re going to get from me.
The novelist is also a whiz at bringing geography to vivid, throbbing life, so much so that Budapest and the wilds of Snowdonia now top my travel bucket list.
It’s to Jones’ immense credit that, like the best authors of psychologically rich horror (Anne Rice and Glen Duncan come to mind), he resists taking the easy way out and making his villain one-dimensionally pure evil. Jakab inspires both pity and empathy, even as we despise his actions and fear for his victims.
Finally, Jones displays a rare gift for writing about children, fully developing them in what’s an essentially adult story. The kids in “The String Diaries” get equal weight with the adults; they’re never just small, terrified props, as is so often the case. One of the children in the novel, in fact, gets set up as the possible protagonist for a sequel. Here’s hoping. (MCT)
