Ruminating on Voice of our Shadow

Apologies for not blogging yesterday, but I just fell asleep right after my evening dinner until  somewhere around midnight when I woke up wondering if someone had drenched me with cold water. After I changed my clothes, I slept right back through the night until 7 to get up for work.
I've been having these weird tired spells alot recently. For now I'm just ascribing it to residue fallout from the beginning-of-the-year flu spell I had.

Wide awake now though. Blame it on 12 hours of sleep and 8 hours of sitting on a chair doing inventory, cleaning working gear and oiling wood. And in case you're wondering, no, that's not a euphemism. My hands, after washing several times, still smell like wood oil. And before you say, well, Levi, that's not too bad...

It bloody is.

Me after reeking of oil for several hours, not halfway through the day,

Bolster-Wagon in the background.

In the reading department I finished Voice of Our Shadow yesterday and I'm still putting my thoughts together on it.

As a story it's pretty awful, though its beginning was very good, intimate even, and it managed to keep me engaged and continuously reading at a fast pace. It's just that something seems wrong with the ending: everything goes so insanely off the rails and a resolution seems non-existent. As an experiment it's intriguing and as a character piece it's one of those that stays true to the main character, but it seems to go too far with that (to the detriment of the story).
I also wouldn't have classified it as a Fantasy Masterwork. Horror, on the other hand, yeah sure. It certainly has more than a few startling moments, and later in the story there are certain surreal elements that are unquestionable horrific. But again, story-wise, it's... incomplete, is the only way I can put it right now, which in my book lets it fail as fiction, as storytelling and certainly as a masterwork. It seems obvious to me that this is an experiment. A character experiment with an unreliable narrator.
But, and this is where the problem lies: it's a narrator who seems to be unreliable only within certain parts of his storytelling. The idea is:
Story is told within the confines of 2 events: Opening sentences on Formori, Greece, which seamlessly continues on into the flashback, which extends for the whole novel... basically IS the whole novel, and then the half page epilogue is also set on Greece, an indeterminate span of time after the last chapter. But surely an unreliable narrator would wrap it up somehow. Not leave everything hanging? Once an unreliable narrator, always an unreliable narrator. There's no reason for this ending.

I'm not saying that the road is lost, oh no. It's quite clear how the protagonist arrives from the ending of the last chapter to where he's at in the epilogue. Everyone can fill in blanks when needed. It's just: the fact that there is no continuation doesn't stroke with the concept of the unreliable narrator. There should be excuses, there should be answers, there should be some form of resolution, but there is in fact nothing, there is only a limbo.
It's as if we've gone from lies to truth in a blink, as if the narrator has become unable to craft an ending to his story, even with having proven-unreliability having cropped up in the past, which should mean he could have cobbled something together now, here, at the end.

It's as if the control has been lost somewhere, with no explanation to account for the difference in state of the story's beginning to the state of the story's ending. For now I'm guessing that the author just let it go.
Because it doesn't make sense otherwise, and it certainly doesn't resolve itself. Unless of course the epilogue takes place in another kind of limbo entirely... oh... oh... shit.

Hmm, more fodder for the Fantasy Masterwork review. So, for now: several ways of looking at that ending.
I have an interesting character dissertation that only relates to one of those 2 endings, and a specific element of the novel that I talk about for every fantasy masterwork, something that's unique to me, something that I enjoyed or have an original opinion or take on. But I have to say; this particular theory is one that makes me seem like one of those run-of-the-mill wannabe critical reviewers. Genuinely one of those ideas that is so shockingly rote and cliché that I should just drop it right the fuck now, and yet... And yet I still see it here.

So that's up next.
It's shaping up quite swiftly too. Good thing too because I generally have difficulty moving into the next novel if a Fantasy Masterwork review is coming up.
Also: Titus Groan still needs some writing but as that is part of a (somewhat) series there's no rush with that one.