In my attempt to play catch up, I am going back to a novel I read a few weeks ago: Mary Lawson's The Other Side of the Bridge, which was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, and it is not hard to see why. I wrote when I finished it that: "This is a good, satisfying novel [but]...it is not a great novel."
The link to the Random House site, above, includes a summary and some review quotes, so I won't re-cover that ground here. The novel seemed to me to be about the complexities of loving relationships: between parents and children; siblings; men and women; individuals and communities. It is also about how these kinds of love combine to form, or threaten contentment. Lawson is a very compact writer, in the sense that she conveys an awful lot in a few phrases, and this allows her to crank the tension towards the denoument in an enjoyable and believable way. She is also an extremely good storyteller - the structure and pace here are gripping. I would certainly recommend this novel, and look forward to reading more by her.
So why did I begin with the assertion that this is good but not great? It does everything right, but I just couldn't find the extraordinary, the small thing which sets this above other good novels. I guess that missing ingredient is necessarily intangible, or there could be no such thing as a great novel...
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