Swallowing the Sun

This is primarily a character-driven novel, though the last hundred pages or so are powered by an adrenalin-tinged plot. The pages turn themselves, but there is a depth here not found in most "thrillers." David Park is not simply a storyteller, he has something to say about the world. A word of warning, before my praise. The subject matter here is emotionally gripping. To say more is to give away too much, but this is not a "feel good" novel. Because Park is so good at evoking the sense of the moment, some moments are quite difficult for the reader. Just fair warning that this book is not light and airy. A talented writer, David Park crafts original prose and uses telling details to set tone and mood: "...a skinny shake of a dog...", "...The boats feel like bookmarks on the pages of different types of lives...", and "...As Roberts moves to the door she watches the thin spray of crumbs fall silently to the floor. She wonders if the biscuit was soft..." His writing is evocative and tight. He describes characters and their relationships with one another in a pleasingly efficient way. (Both of the following are from early in the novel, before the Warings' own personal Troubles.) Martin and his wife Alison: "She...tells herself that she should wait up for him to hear him say, as he always does, `Give me some of your heat,' but knows already that she is slipping towards sleep. And now if anyone were to ask her, she would say that's all that marriage is about - a sharing of heat, trying to protect each other from the cold outside." Martin and his daughter Rachel: "So why doesn't he come in now, sit on her bed and give her some advice? Tell her the things he knows. About how to find someone to love. When you give yourself. She swivels on her chair to signal him in, but there is no one there and when she turns the music down, she hears only the sound of running water. She lifts the little glass dome, shakes it softly and watches the snow fall." Park shifts perspective from character to character, moving almost seemlessly from one character to the next. Though this is by no means a stream-of-consciousness novel, having just finished Virginia Woolf's THE WAVES, it struck me how Park uses a similar shifting-of-perspectives, but in a much more conventional manner. Woolf demonstrated how the object of one's study can often be illuminated and understood much more fully if through the multi-dimensional experience shifting perspectives allow. Park has taken those lessons, from Woolf or whomever, and has worked them into a pleasing, revealing style all his own. Park's book also reminded me a bit of Bulgakov's THE WHITE GUARD. Like Bulgakov's work, SWALLOWING THE SUN is very much tied to both place and outside events and, yet, not "about" the place or the political events so central to that place. The novels are both about relationships and, in particular, the relationships within a single family. I will not say that Park has achieved with SWALLOWING TH