I.S.P BLOG #4

PERSONALITY by Andrew O'Hagan

I appreciate how O'Hagan succinctly introduces the subject to open the novel. "The body of Enrico Colangelo" will intrigue lovers of mystery or murder, but it keeps all other readers on the line by giving him a name; we know that there is more than just a decaying corpse on the shore. The setting is well set up as well in the beginning, life is given to the sea by it being called "violent." After all, so far as we know it was the violent sea that murdered this man.

There is unique character drive; we do not have a random gross dead person, this European tenor still is given motive, a thought process that his heart- although dead-keeps alive. "He could swim to the lifeboats, he'd find her there." The protagonists, a group of local boys, come across the body; we feel slight suspense in that we already know there is a body there and we are just waiting for the naive kids to come across it.

The narrative is omniscient and comes with a perspective of one of the boys, grown up, looking more than 50 years into the past. I get this number from the book itself: "only then, as a man of sixty-two, would Neil remember the fingers of the washed up man at Traig Iais." The voice also supports that idea, it uses the local tongue ("jumpers, crofters") and brings up personal details that only a local would bring up long after, as a way of reminiscing. "From the top you could look across the sound to South Uist and the place where Charles Edward Stuart met Flora Macdonald at midnight." It's also that of a storyteller, who isn't going to dance around the subject of a corpse.

There is artful sensory detailing of the boys at play in the Marram grass; "it was frightening to hear the crash of the waves and feel the rush of the sand that would sting your face and push you back to the dunes."