Reading this book is like stepping into a fast-flowing river that comes up to just below your knees.
Your senses are assaulted by the cold, the force of the flow, the hard but hidden objects on the river bed. You struggle for balance, for a place to stand and then, if you can open your mind to it, you start to feel the river's pulse and be lulled by its song.
Of course, you know your presence distorts the flow and that you can only focus on the water as it brushes past you while the totality of the river remains beyond your grasp but that seems enough.
Then, just as you think you are in tune with the river and its ways, you see the dark, hard to discern, almost as fluid as the river itself, shapes moving with purpose through the water and soon you can focus on nothing else.
Ten hours into this twenty-one-hour-long book, I've grown used to and fond of the tumultuous flow of Blue's thoughts, laden as they are with well-documented reference sources and the way her memories of her nomadic life can create eddies that pull her thoughts off course for a while and then catapult her forward. I had begun to think of this experience as being what the book is about. Yet, so far, almost nothing has happened. Blue has been living her life without her energy being channelled by a plot.
Now though, I can see small dark pieces of narrative thrusting through the water and I'm left thinking that this may not be at all the kind of book I believed it was.
Which, of course, makes me keen to read the next eleven hours of the book.
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