Books Without Borders :: The Jane Austen Book Club

I read this book a while ago and wasn’t particularly impressed. Having seen numerous reviews praising it, I was looking forward to reading it and was disappointed.

The book started off reasonably enough. There was a prologue giving a little summary of each of the six characters we were about to meet – the members of the Jane Austen book club. This gave a little taster about each of them and I was keen to learn more.

We then jumped straight into the first book club meeting and discovered a little more about Jocelyn, the first of the six characters, who just happened to bear a resemblance to Emma, the heroine of the book under discussion. Sadly, this was where it got a little confusing, with the story jumping repeatedly between the past and the present. By the end of the first chapter we knew Jocelyn’s history, but very little about the histories of the other five.

Each consecutive chapter was devoted to another Austen book and the history of another of the six characters. By the end we had a story for each of the members of the book club, with each history based around the plot of an Austen book. Their stories did loosely come together by the end, but each chapter seemed more like a short story in its own right than part of something longer. Unfortunately, this didn’t really leave much room to develop the individual characters and I didn’t find myself warming to any of them. Prudie in particular seemed a completely random character, whose story wasn’t really intertwined with the other five and who only seemed to be there to make up the numbers.

The book ended with an epilogue, which in this case was necessary as the previous chapter was again largely devoted to the story of one of the characters. Unfortunately, by this stage I wasn’t too bothered about what happened to any of them, having lost interest well before the end.

Apart from the character development, one of the things that bugged me most about this book was the fact that part of it appeared to be written in the first person, although it wasn’t clear which character was narrating. This was irritating as I generally dislike books written in the first person, but will tolerate them providing it is done well and I know which character is narrating. However, when the writer chops and changes between the first and third person it is just plain annoying.

Oh, and if you read this book with the intention of learning a little more about the Jane Austen novels, forget it. Your time will be much better spent reading the novels themselves. After all, why read what is essentially a cheap rip-off of Austen when you can read the genuine thing?

So, despite some rave reviews, I found The Jane Austen Book Club decidedly underwhelming. But then what did I expect from a book that came free with a magazine?

I tried, i really did, but i couldn't get into it. Have to agree wholeheateredly with Tink and move on to something more entertaining!.

Having bought this a while ago during the hype and following a recommendation from a friend, I thought as it had appeared here it was time to dig it up, dust it down and finally get round to reading it. Having read one or two of the other books recommended by Richard and Judy’s Book Club, I felt reassured this would be of similar quality – I have subsequently learnt there is a difference between appearing on their book list and being recommended by them.

The concept is sound – seven books, seven meetings over six months of six characters; watching their lives change and drawing the parallels to Austin. Unfortunately it was very poorly executed.

I was less bothered about waiting for the relevant chapter to find out more about the specific characters than the other reviewer, and felt that I could see the plot threads running the length of the book (sometimes rather too obviously I am afraid), however I shared her dissatisfaction with the chopping and changing of time frames. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when done - care must be taken to ensure relevance. I thought this was done well in the chapters about the teacher and Bernadette in which a stream of consciousness helped us though but much less well in other chapters, which began to feel like they were switching around just because the end of a paragraph had been reached rather than to enhance the narrative or for any valid artistic reasons.

I felt the first person narration was one of the endearing qualities of the book, taking on an easy and open voice. I was happy to accept this as the voice of the book group together rather than any individual character. I think the author was trying to show the group as an entity in it’s own right, greater than the sum of the parts – unfortunately like so much of the symbolism in the book, it was rather laboured as such and therefore lost any merit it may have originally had.

The epilogue, though necessary to finish the story off, was for me very disjointed and left me with the feeling that the author had gotten so far with her plan for the characters but became unsure how to get them to her planned ending, and therefore chose to leave that bit out and just put them there. Not to say anything in the ending was a particular surprise, having by then worked out where we were all heading.

This is an un-taxing read, but not particularly distinctive or engaging. In the end, the book fell foul of one of the main points it’s characters espoused. Comparing most authors to Austen is inviting disappointment, and in this Joy Fowler was no exception.