BlueEyedBoy

Blueeyedboy

  - Joanne Harris

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have loved almost all the Joanne Harris novels I read (until recently, that is), and "Gentlemen and Players" is among my most favorite novels. Therefore, I felt terrible about hating this one.

While 'Different Class' was written in the form of diary entries, the narration of Blueeyedboy constitutes a series of blog posts. The posts, by the virtue of anonymity provided by the internet, make the distinction between fact and fiction completely fuzzy. But either way, the primary narrator comes across as a psychopath. It is a dark and disturbing tale of anger, fear, abuse, and hate, though there does not seem to be much of a plot for it to revolve around. The timelines were confusing, and it was difficult to make out what was going on. It also has an excess of philosophical musings and psycho-analysis, and I ended up skipping several of these paragraphs.

I find it annoying when an author purposefully misdirects the reader. In "Different Class" Harris misled the reader about the identity of the narrator, revealing it only at about the 60% mark. In 'Blueeyedboy' she deliberately misleads us about the identity of both the narrators, and in an even more underhanded manner. Another device she has employed more than once is to indicate a tragic event and its untold repercussions from the very beginning and continue to build upon it throughout, but reveal the actual event only towards the end. This was used to a worse effect than earlier, and I didn't just stop caring about it, I positively loathed it.

The end is not simply open-ended - we don't get to know who did what, or even if someone did anything. I also expected to find the answers to some of the questions left open in "Different Class" but they were not resolved, at least for me [What had happened to Mousy? And what eventually became of Spikely? What was Harrington's actual motive?]