Review: Touch by Alexi Zentner

Title: Touch
Author: Alexi Zentner
Pages: 288
Release Date: 12 May 2011
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Source: Amazon Vine

On the eve of his mother’s funeral, Stephen, a middle-aged priest, sits down to write her eulogy. But as the evening creeps into night, he is haunted by memories from his childhood: birthday trips to the cuts with his father; the moment his sister slipped under the thick winter ice forever; and the memorable day his grandfather, Jeannot, came home after a thirty-year absence with a bundle of bones in his pocket and a mission to raise the dead.

Masterfully weaving the stories from three generations of one family, Touch tells the founding tale of Sawgamet – originally a gold-mining village – where deep in the forest reign golden caribou drinking from a honey-sweet river. Yet also in the forest lurk malevolent shapeshifters disguising themselves as friends, storms raging against foolhardy settlers, and the forest taking back the land for itself, branch by branch and root by root.

Touch is a singular, startling debut as enchanting as it is unnerving. In this darkly sinister fairy tale Alexi Zentner builds a magical world as distinctive as a grown-up Narnia, and marks himself out as a real talent to watch.

The review on the flap of this book really caught my attention and I couldn't wait to read it, I was convinced I was going to be completely mesmerised by Touch, unfortunately this didn't happen, I just don't feel like it lived up to my expectations, by quite a long way. Although there is some wonderful descriptive imagery within the novel I found that the author has for the most part ignored the first rule of novel writing (no, not "write what you know) "show don't tell". Most of the stories are told to us in the form of Stephen narrating various tales that have been passed to him by family and friends.

I never felt that we got deep enough inside the characters for me to actually care about them. There are deaths described of people which, with a bit more thought, could have been very moving. There are aspects of the story following the deaths where you can see that Zentner is trying to stir your emotions but I felt that he'd left it a little too late, we need to get to know a character before anything drastic happens to them as then we feel more for them.

Touch reminded me a lot of a Coen brothers film, the basis of the story is interesting enough and if I were to just read a few snippets then it would interest me enough to make me want to read more but the actual novel just plods along and is quite slow. I know to a lot of people describing it as being like a Coen brothers film is a good thing, they have a lot of fans and win a lot of awards, but they're not my thing, their films don't hold my attention, they bore me and I'm afraid that's how I felt about this book. I'm sure a lot of people will love it for the language and imagery within it, but for me it was sadly lacking.

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