I wanted to read The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow because I know a lot about witch history. I did my Masters on Witch Literature (about, not by) and I taught a course on witch mythology last summer.
Thus, this book did not teach me a damn thing, except that I don’t like this book.
As it’s about the last witchfinder, it’s set in the 18th Century. Fine and dandy. It’s narrated by a book. Not fine and dandy.
This is a book about how science is powerful, but we’re supposed to believe that books are sentient and have the ability to possess people.
And books as objects aren’t sentient–books as ideas are sentient. So even if there are millions of copies, there is only one book. And our narrator would have you believe that “good” literature is smart literature and that other books are dim.
The narrator, aside from being a book, is a pretentious asshole. The narrator likes to say how great the heroine is. It does this so it doesn’t have to show us.
Yes–hundreds of pages, but no emotional connection to the characters. And there is a plot, but the arc of the story doesn’t work and thus it’s basically episodic with what should be a climax, but is decidedly not.
Now, maybe I’m not supposed to like the narrator or the plot or any of the characters. Maybe that’s because this is a book about obsession, and might have you see that obsession makes you boring.
But I don’t think it’s that clever, even if it really thinks it is.
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