The Bestowing Sun review by Neil Ayres (Fragment Magazine) 241103
This review is written by Neil Ayres, whose novel Nicolo’s Gifts has recently been published by Bluechrome, and will appear in a future edition of Fragment Magazine.
The Hardy Boy
Neil Grimmett’s debut, and the first release from Flame Books, instantly wrongfooted me: here we have a relatively unknown writer and a brand new small press publisher, yet the product and the prose both exude professionalism. Neil Grimmett’s narrative voice is enviably selfpossessed and assured, the tale told is related with the confidence of a storyteller who is able to take a captive audience for granted.
Above all else, it is the characterisation that drives The Bestowing Sun, as finely wrought as any. Grimmett understands well the need to give his players space in which to perform: everything is revealed with patience, as necessity demands, and there is little here of inconsequence to the feel of the work. I am amazed that the author maintains such a well-defined voice throughout the novel. Indeed, when we depart Somerset for the climes of some generic Italian village, Grimmett’s only fault is that his prose drops from the sublime to the merely good. Not much of a criticism I know, but there it is.
His style is disarmingly simple, straight talking yet poetic and with a knack for metaphorical description. Here Miles, an avid book lover, consoles his daughter Selina:
“He saw the bruises beginning to darken on the white parchment of his daughter’s cheek, could follow the uneven lines and wails of red, clawed down her long neck and spine, see the full stops of blood starting to coagulate on her perfect knees as she must have fallen trying to escape.”
And Miles wants to explain too, how the village that has caused her such suffering is but a microcosm of life, with every action indefinitely intensified, but he does not.
Some readers may struggle to accept Neil Grimmett’s hardworn and cynical characters, some of whom we cannot forgive certain deeds, even if their fellows can: but is this the author’s echoing of his protagonists ability? Does Grimmett seek to strip away the fallacies of his characters with his fiction, as does the artist within his pages? It is in my mind Neil Grimmett’s greatest achievement in this novel to not have us reflect on the human condition, but what we are without it. For without the fallacies he and his artist creation seek to tear from us, what are we?
And Grimmett catches too something of the utmost importance for his readership: Neil Grimmett is not dealing with real people, he is dealing with characterisation, and the character he captures is an undeniably English one, and his subject matter is made more stark, more frightening, by this realisation. Neil Grimmett shines a light on the English literary psyche: what have the English: there is a blank, there is stoic and pompous silence. And Grimmett strives to rip apart this blankness and enlighten us as to what lies beneath. But it is a difficult task and his most likeable of characters, the patriarch Herbie, proves the most unknowable: a double-edged sword of nobility and cunning, knowledge and ignorance: the Serpent in the Garden.
The book’s ending is unsurprisingly unconventional: what we had hoped for, perhaps. The two pivotal players remain furtive characters, and those who are gouged open to be read like prophetic entrails are slightly redeemed, but having learned concern for them, are they yet likeable? My guess is that it’s up to the reader to decide. Neil Grimmett’s debut should stand strong enough to avoid the need for criticism; like the farmer bearing the pike and the old woman facedown in a puddle, The Bestowing Sun is art.
© Neil Ayres, Fragment Magazine
Link: Fragment Magazine (pdf)
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