Who says you can't go home again? For the narrator of Joanne Harris's charming new novel, "Coastliners," you can't do anything else. Even when you're not wanted.Home for Madeleine is a tiny island off the coast of France called Devin, "the single place for which there can be no substitute." Her mother wrenched her away from this dot of land when she was a little girl, leaving behind a husband and a town sinking fast into depression. Now, a decade later, Madeleine has buried her mother and returned to reclaim her father, who never answered her letters or fulfilled her dreams.Harris leapt to stardom three years ago with "Chocolat," a creamy feminist novel that inspired an even sweeter Hollywood movie starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. With "Coastliners," she's moved away from the food themes of her earlier works, but she's still interested in how a determined woman can invigorate a stagnant community."Le Devin is no beauty," Madeleine confesses, with its "rough primitive look." It's suffering from two corrosive forces: First, a long-standing feud between the rich end of the island and the poor end, where Madeleine's father still lives, renders any cooperation impossible. Second, a devastating shift in the tides is gradually sweeping her hometown into the sea.Harris is something of an expert on how a community's beliefs conspire to limit its citizens' actions and prospects. These poor people practice a kind of "naturalized Catholicism" that makes them fatalistic and passive. As their homes and graves slowly wash into the sea, the residents have grown ever more devoted to charms, symbols, incantations, and rituals.(No doubt the inevitable movie version of this cinematic book will caramelize the role of religion into something more palatable, just as the repressive priest was replaced by a stern nobleman in Hollywood's "Chocolat.")Madeleine returns home during the annual festival of Sainte-Marine-de-la-Mer, when the townspeople carry a statue of their patron saint down to the shore for baptism. It's a last-ditch effort for a community desperate to turn the tide, but Madeleine's appearance startles her father and causes the statue to fall into the sea. This is a sure omen of another Black Year, hardly the homecoming she wanted.Harris takes some interesting risks with this plot. The most daring is her long delay of the reunion between daughter and father, a man so depressed that he can no longer speak. Even when they finally do meet, their reunion is surprisingly muted and anticlimactic, yielding none of the joy and certainly none of the resolution Madeleine was naive enough to hope for. The novel remains painfully honest to the conflicted feelings of exasperation and love inspired by caring for an odd, difficult parent who must now be parented.But Madeleine isn't particularly honest with herself. She thinks of herself as jetsam, tossed about on the waves, but in fact she has a deep-keeled will. Her father may not respond to her prescriptions for recovery, but she's determined to save the town by transforming it into a tourism attraction.While these well-drawn curmudgeons whine bitterly about their inevitable decay, Madeleine argues for strategic sandbags and breakwaters. These are people intimately involved with the sea, but it's taken too many of their loved ones for them to be in love with it. And their thought is too deeply invested in miracles to do anything to save themselves.Finally, Madeleine turns to a shadowy beachcomber who eschews her direct assault on the town's beliefs for a more effective, if decidedly unethical, manipulation of their gloomy superstitions.Of course, even hard-won victories over the tide are bound to be temporary. But if sandy shores can't be reformed for good, grains of thought prove more malleable. Madeleine, meanwhile, must consider if there's an undertow beneath her civic activism, a deeper, more selfish motive for saving these people's homes and businesses. By the end, the plot is awash in enough last-minute twists and familial revelations for a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.The death of small towns is a worldwide anxiety in this age of globalization. Back in April, Kate Grenville released, "The Idea of Perfection," a romantic comedy about a tiny Australian town determined to save itself by promoting its Bent Bridge as a must-see tourist destination. Ironically, isolated communities rendered economically irrelevant in the new marketplace are finding salvation by clinging to their peculiarities and marketing them to a world of numbing homogeneity. Good novelists deliver a far more complex examination of this phenomenon than economists ever could.Harris is fast becoming one of the most reliable writers of appealing, idea-driven fiction. This affecting story about community resilience blends environmental and social themes with her signature wit and élan. By the end, when Madeleine cries, "This was how it feels to be an islander; this is how it feels to belong," we know just what she's talking about.http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0905/p1...
Меня тут спрашивали, что почитать летом, когда голова выключается. Вот отличная книжка, которую я всегда рекомендую тем, кто собирается в отпуск: очень приключенческая, очень морская и соленая, а за сюжетом только поспевай, но без ущерба для выразительных средств языка.Как часто у Хэррис, в центре внимания - красивая странствующая брюнетка с багажом, состоящим в основном из семейных тайн. В данном случае девушка не убегает, а возвращается домой - на маленький французский остров, где издавна враждуют два поселения. Одно из них бедное, другое - зажиточное, в каждом имеется пара-тройка потрясающе харизматичных персонажей, которые ведут борьбу за туристов и прожиточный минимум, при этом в описываемое время бедным серьезно не везет: их периодически то смывает, то сдувает, и вот Мадо, как Чип и Дейл, приходит на помощь соотечественникам и отцу, который почему-то не хочет с ней разговаривать.По мне, это один из лучших романов Хэррис: не слишком мистифицированный, очень человечный, очень обаятельный. Сюжет запутан грамотно и распутан умно, то есть в конце все оказывается совершенно не так, как вы предполагали, но девушка при этом не оборачивается внезапно замаскированным двуглавым драконом или матерью собственной сестры, например. Понравилось, что толково прописаны не только главная героиня, но и дюжина второстепенных, у всех есть особенная родинка на носу и логичная мотивация, всем веришь и всех любишь, но в разные моменты времени. Минус - после прочтения невыносимо хочется во Францию и вкусно пообедать.
What do You think about Coastliners (2003)?
Let me start by saying I LOVE Joanne Harris. I think Gentlemen and Players is one of the best suspense books ever, love Chocolat, love Holy Fools, but for the life of me I could barely like this book. The writing is great, there are a lot of great devices and interesting twists. But I wasn't interested in the storyline or the islanders and had a particular dislike for the three main characters - particularly Mado who is the main character. I felt it is falling into the Velda Johnston/ Victoria Holt tradition at several points and when the ten to twelve last plot twists hit, I'd already really had it with the story. I saw it through because I love the author and I will read all of her books I haven't gotten to. Maybe this one just didn't hit me right, so to speak, but it was pretty painful following the lives of these isolated, superstitious people. If it were a history I think I would have liked it more. But excellent style, as always.
—Deana David Lissenberg
I give this book a solid 3.5. After reading "Chocolat" by the same author, it was hard not to be slightly disappointed in this book because the language and descriptions in "Chocolat" are more sensory-detailed oriented than "Coastliners." I enjoyed reading "Coastliners" but would have liked more poetic, sensuous language at times. I also felt that the book was too long for the story that was being told and tended to lose interest in several places, only to have that interest piqued again. Perhaps if this was a multi-POV novel, I would have felt the length to be more justified. Nothing really changed in the story or the main character, except her truth and "character" became more revealed to her. There's nothing inherently "wrong" with that type of plot-less story (as some of the most beautiful writing and stories are just that: reflective, introspective, and built on the notion of returning to one's inner truth), but it would of been interesting to see some of the other characters' POVs to see how reliable the main character's journey was.
—Helen
I read this immediately after finishing Five Quarters of the Orange, and while I didn't enjoy it as much (probably because it's all beach and dunes instead of confit and pastry), I found myself musing again on how everyone in the novel was a bad person. I suppose you could argue "flawed" instead of "evil," but when you boil it down, the central trait of every character was a negative one: this one is scheming, that one is lying, the other one is holding a decades old grudge. All in all it's a bit unsettling in what is otherwise basically a story about coming home and finding the place where you've always belonged. A familiar theme, executed in a mildly disturbing way, with an incongruously happy ending.
—Little
