A Festive Juxtaposition - Paul R. Stanton - ★★★
AUTHOR: Paul R. Stanton
GENRE: Contemporary Magical Realism, Christmas.
RATING: 3 stars.
In a Nutshell: An interesting story combining magical realism with philosophical undertones. Enjoy the Christmas spirit from an unusual perspective. The editing should have been much better though.
Story Synopsis:
On the evening of Christmas Eve, the Devil suddenly pops up outside Charing Cross station in London. Dressed dapperly, he is a man (oops, a devil) on a mission. But what is the mission? Whom is he looking for? Has he come to mess up Christmas?
The story comes to us in a third person omniscient narration.
As the cover indicates, this isn’t your typical jolly Christmas story. The book focusses on the side of Christmas that’s usually hidden by the festivities and glamour, but that is relevant nonetheless. As the official blurb is kept to the bare minimum, I too can’t go much into story details, though there is a lot to analyse in the main content. So I will keep my review vague.
The main reason I picked this up was to know why the devil decided to make an earthly visit on Christmas Eve. The book details his reasons wonderfully. Every interaction he has reinforces his purpose. There are multiple mini-stories throughout the book, which sometimes feel repetitive in circumstances. However, each of the mini tales gets a proper completion (not always a happy one, but almost always a deserved one) at the end of the book. This epilogue of sorts was my favourite part of this novella, and it helped me much to look beyond the shortcomings.
The devil’s role in the story is the icing on the cake. I happen to be watching Season Two of Good Omens right now, and this might have had a small part in my picturing the suavely portrayed devil as David Tennant in his role as the demon Crowley. 😄 (He does suit the part well!) I loved how atypical the devil’s character arc is. He isn’t just shown as stylishly distinguished, but his behaviour is also unlike how he is usually depicted in fiction. This is the best part of the book.
Many of the secondary characters are interesting. While some of their arcs seem alike each other’s thanks to the similarity in their circumstances, the resolution is distinct.
The author clearly knows London, and he captures its vibe wonderfully. The locations are incorporated in the story in such a manner that you feel like you are right there, next to the devil, navigating the city with him as he goes about his business.
I do not enjoy philosophical stories, and this novel does get a tad too metaphysical at times. Thankfully for me, a good chunk of the content is pragmatic than esoteric, though there is a strong religious flavour as well.
All the above indicate what I liked about the book. But there is one factor that proved a strong hindrance in my enjoying the book better. And that is the writing style.
I am a fusspot when it comes to prose. I can ignore a few typos here and there; authors are human after all. However, the writing shortcomings in this book went much beyond the odd typo. There were way too many adjectives and adverbs, with sentences sometimes so overloaded with descriptive add-ons that their length doubled. I don’t notice the quantum of adjectives and adverbs most of the times, so if I actually realised their presence in the book, they *were* too many! (I did a simple Kindle search for the letters 'ly' - not an accurate indicator of adverbs but the best shortcut I could think of to get an estimate. The result was a staggering 1142 matches! In a 178 page novella! Just for a comparison, Stephen King, who is known to be liberal with adverbs, has 2263 in his 600-page tome, 'Fairy Tale'.)
There were myriad other writing problems:
- Incorrect words (‘immured’ instead of ‘inured’, ‘drudge’ instead of ‘drudgery’);
- Word usage goofs (‘thronged’ was used transitively, ‘riposte’ was used when there was no riposte at all);
- Word repetition – sometimes within the same sentence (“I have a bit of time to kill, and to be honest with you my feet are killing me in these shoes. They’re brand new you see. I thought I would wear them in a bit, but now I’m beginning to think that was a bit of a mistake.”);
- Redundancy (“There was no rationale to it, no sound reason or logic to it at all”; ” I think it’s all finally coming together at long last”);
- Needless fillers (“I can see you are, as they say, on the horns of a dilemma. A dilemma, I would say, that is of your own making”); and
- Grammatical errors (“Many was the time”, “The Church, in their infinite wisdom, was considering…”).
All the above examples are indicative and not exhaustive, and don't include punctuation errors. After a point, I stopped highlighting errata because I already had too many.
There is also an overload of adages and quotes that make the dialogues seem pretentious. I can understand the devil’s having a distinctive speaking style, but the humans in the story also sounded verbose. At times, it also appeared as if a word had been substituted with its equivalent from the thesaurus, without bothering to see if the alternate word fit the sentence in terms of usage as well. The breaking of the fourth wall, with the omniscient narrator speaking directly to the reader, also didn’t help.
Basically, the whole book, though just a novella, felt overwritten, as if it were trying hard to impress with highbrow vocabulary. I wish an editor could have gone over this work with a fine-toothed comb, because the content was good enough to click at a more simplistic level; it didn’t need such frivolous embellishments.
If you aren’t as particular as I am about grammar and usage, and can focus on the content based on what it is rather than how it is presented, you might like this book better. Sadly for me, there were too many stylistic hurdles to jump over, so I couldn’t relish the experience better.
I am also not too happy about that noir-like cover as it simply doesn’t indicate that this is a tale embodying the Christmas spirit. Though I must also add that after reading the novella, a part of me gets why such a cover was chosen. I hope the book reaches the right reader looking for a redemptive kind of Christmas tale with strong Dickensian vibes.
Recommended only to those who can focus on the beauty of the story and ignore the lack of finishing, at least until this indie work is edited and reprinted. I hope it is, because the story is worth a read.
4 stars for the story, 2 stars for the writing. Averaging it out.
My thanks to Coffee and Thorn Book Tours, and author Paul R. Stanton for a complimentary copy of “A Festive Juxtaposition”, and for allowing me to be a part of this blog tour. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.
Content Warnings: Trigger warnings: deaths of miscreants, suicidal ideation and imagery in one brief section, religious themes.
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Author Paul R. Stanton:
Connect with him on:
Website: https://paulrstanton.ampbk.com/
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Blurb:
It was Christmas Eve in the good old city of London. Everything was alive with the joyous sounds of festive exchanges; carols floated on the breeze and gently wafted across the cold waters of the river Thames. Multi-coloured lights appeared to festoon the streets in every quarter, and the fragrant heady smell of pine needles could be detected everywhere. There was nothing quite like it. It could be said that there was, in fact, magic in the air.
At that point the Devil arrived at Charing Cross station. He was dressed immaculately in an Astrakhan coat, leather gloves and patent leather shoes that were so brightly polished you could see your face in them. He sported a small black goatee beard and had features that could easily have been chiseled from stone. Smiling, he stepped out into the night. But what was his purpose for being there? Was it purely philanthropic? Or, did he have an ulterior motive up his sleeve? As the evening wore on, the good old city was about to find out.
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Check out this book:
Buy Links: https://www.azonlinks.com/1398494240
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This has been a stop on the #AFestiveJuxtaposition blog tour conducted by Coffee and Thorn Book Tours. (@CoffeeAndThorn) Thanks for stopping by!
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