The blurb:
Taryn Cornick barely remembers the family library. Since her sister was murdered, she’s forgotten so much.
Now it’s all coming back. The fire. The thief. The scroll box. People are asking questions about the library. Questions that might relate to her sister’s murder.
And something called The Absolute Book.
A book in which secrets are written – and which everyone believes only she can find. They insist Taryn be the hunter. But she knows the truth.
She is the hunted . . .The Absolute Book is a tale of sisters, ancient blood, a forgotten library, murder, revenge and a book that might just have the answer to everything.
The review:
There’s a specific type of fantasy that I really love.
Well… there are a lot of varieties of fantasy that I love, but there’s this one variety that I really should seek out more. The type that feels like General Fiction, but with a twist of the other. It’s perhaps not exactly urban fantasy, because it tends to lack the tropes, and it’s not exactly portal fantasy, because the majority of the book takes place in our world. Think along the lines of the movie, About Time, or something like The Undoing of Arlo Knott by Heather Child.
All those words to say… I had been dying to read The Absolute Book for months. Just because it seemed to fit into exactly this niche. The comparisons I kept seeing were Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. That’s some high praise! Though I realise both books are a bit love-them-or-hate-them.
And If I’m honest, I think this one will be too.
The Absolute Book starts off by detailing a murder and introducing you to the victim’s sister, Taryn. The court takes mercy on the poor boy that ran over Taryn’s sister with his car and hid her body in his trunk, and so he finds himself free in a sickeningly short amount of time. At least, that is, until Taryn leverages a dangerous man’s infatuation with her in order to put him down for good.
From there, things get a little crazy. It turns out that being closely involved with two murders changes a person. But with a murder investigation, a stalker, a demon invasion, and portals to other worlds opening up… Taryn doesn’t really get the chance to take some me-time.
It’s hard to sum up what The Absolute Book is “about”, as it has a very scattered focus. It feels really open-ended as you go through, which does mean that it isn’t very predictable (besides a few tropey lines of foreshadowing that experienced readers will be familiar with), but also means that you don’t really know what’s going on for a lot of the book. You take a journey to the world of the Fae, and you see that some creepy, scary folks are circling around Taryn, but for the longest time you never really know why.
Elizabeth Knox doesn’t just hand you the information you want. She takes her time, establishing a scene, slowly peeling back the layers of her world, her characters, and their pasts every few chapters. Honestly, the best comparison I can make is the TV show LOST. Remember when LOST would introduce a bunch of crazy stuff, ignore it for a couple of seasons, and then maybe half of that stuff would eventually become relevant again and drive the plot? Yeah. There’s a bit of that here. And I have to admit that I found that sense of opaqueness really frustrating, while also being really intrigued by the drip-fed bits of information I was handed. Several times I found myself re-reading paragraphs or even whole pages to see if I’d missed something, only to find that I hadn’t. This ties into the long passages of scenery descriptions that some readers may find pretty, but as a very visual reader, I often found verbose.
The way in which information was passed to the characters was likewise very frustrating, and to me, it felt very convoluted. One character would say a thing, another character would reply with something nonsensical, then a couple more exchanges and paragraphs would be needed to unpick the original response. There is some in-world justification for this, but it made for a very stop-start reading experience.
In terms of characterisation, The Absolute Book is the type of novel that mostly leaves its readers to fill in the blanks. I found that I preferred the characterisation in snapshots — there were some wonderfully emoted scenes where I could really put myself into the characters’ shoes and feel their worries and anxieties. But there’s not really any exploration or deep dive into a character’s emotions or state of mind after the fact. Between those big scenes, the characters can feel rather muted. Stuff happens to them, they move on, and we’re left with only glimpses of the consequences. Looking back after reading the book as a whole, it felt more like a “join the dots” affair rather than an organic journey. The ending, for example, seemed to only loosely tie into the rest of the book, and did so in a way that I found really unsatisfactory. Where I was looking for evidence of growth or continuing struggle, what I got instead sometimes felt like hand-waving.
I couldn’t really get a handle on whether I enjoyed the style of prose or not, either. There were some passages that felt really insightful and struck a chord with me. And yet in others there was this really clinical tinge that is one of my pet hates. Stuff like referring to someone going to the toilet as “urination”, or talking of someone’s hair “caressing their breasts” as they lie back in water. There is also a scene where, during a demonic possession, a character becomes convinced that her friends only want her for “the wetness inside of her”. As well as a scene where a demon randomly turns up sporting a boner for no discernable reason.
(I should note that while there is no on-page sexual violence, the spectre of it does hang over certain scenes, and there is some consideration as to whether it has happened off-page. There is also a late-book subplot featuring a relationship where the consent is very questionable to say the least.)
If I had to sum up The Absolute Book in one word, it would be “frustrating”. And that’s because, despite all of the grievances I’ve aired above, there was a lot about this book I liked! But those parts are hard to pin down. Despite my frustrations with how the information was conveyed, I cherished every little thing I found out about Knox’s world. When the pasts of the characters were laid bare, I wanted to hug them and fight for them, flawed people though they may be. I’ve already mentioned how powerful some of the individual scenes were, and I just want to highlight again how vivid and wonderful I found them. From a long-overdue confrontation, to a chase through the afterlife, to a frank conversation with a parent, to a lecture about the burning of libraries.
But though I loved individual scenes and individual passages, I still feel like there was too much “dead space”, for lack of a better term. It felt sometimes like The Absolute Book was too caught up in trying to be everything that it left some of its most interesting aspects unsupervised for long periods of time. I liked it, but it left me somewhat annoyed because I wanted to love it.
There is every chance that you’ll love this book more than me. If you’re a fan of slower-paced stories with rising tension, enjoy prose that is a little “literary”, and aren’t too put off by the personal frustrations I’ve documented, then I’d encourage you to check it out.
I recieved a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review. Thank you to Penguin for the review copy!
