The Shock of the Fall

Book Title: The Shock of the Fall

Author: Nathan Filer

Date Started: August 10th 2014

Date Completed: August 12th 2014

Genres: Contemporary

Rating: Five stars

Review:

I've never read anything quite like The Shock of the Fall, and I'm still not sure how to do justice to it in a review. There's plenty of books out there that try to achieve what Filer's story shows, but no rivals I'm aware of come near to the honesty of presentation in this book. Of course there were little faults here and there. But I was blown away to be honest.

Simon died about ten years ago. Matthew still thinks it's his fault, even when Simon tries to get him to play like old times again. Matthew is schizophrenic, but he's not an idiot. He knows why he's in the ward, why his life is just a repeating cycle. He knows a lot of things, about people, himself and other things, but he doesn't know anything either. So he writes it down instead. And this is what he writes.

I love Filer's writing style. At first I couldn't really pick out what it was about it, and I'm still not entirely sure. But the embedded narration has got to have something to do with it. I'm not a huge fan of first-person narratives because I think they can easily become one-sided and biased and take a lot of potential away from a story. But Filer deliberately used this to show Matthew as a character, but also the cause and affect of everyone around him - which is something really important in a story about mental illness.

The time jumps really helped this as well; not only when Matt skipped parts of his story, but also the little reminders that he's writing retrospectively and the locations he's in at the time. (Even the fonts added to this affect! There was a subtle difference between how he wrote on his typewriter back home, and then the computer at the ward.)

Matthew's character was just built up so well through the writing in my opinion: the repetition, and then confession that he copied and pasted parts just brought his personality to life. Finally, the gradual descent of his style as he got worse and better, and worse again was very well done.

The Shock of the Fall doesn't have a storyline, as such. It's more a string of events and thoughts that slowly develop and change. But, for this reason, everything you read is relevant, and has application to the rest of the novel and the characters. I absolutely loved this: it got rid of the issue that things might have been going slowly and nothing was really happening. Because everything that happened meant something to Matthew. So he wrote it down.

I loved the brutality of the events, and then the tenderness, and the raw honesty. When you can put soppy scenes, and then scary scenes, and disturbing ones, and sad ones etc in the same book and have it work, I don't know how, but it just makes everything so much more interesting and, strangely, realistic.

The ending, whilst not being what I expected at all, fitted really well with the novel as a whole. It's not a big climax, and it's not a big cliff-hanger. It's just enough to tie up some strings, but leave enough hanging. And it's not happy, but it's not sad. It's uncertain. And that sums up the whole thing for me pretty nicely.

I thought all the characters in this book were very realistic, and each added to Matthew's situation and personality, and therefore the story. However, at the same time, they all had their own stories and troubles, which I think is sometimes overlooked, especially in books focusing so heavily on one person's particular struggles. (I also adore the short time we had Annabelle. I loved her character and her reaction to Matt and I just wish there was more of her.)

Matt was a great protagonist. His narrative was so down to earth and it hit home far more than once. This made his character so much easier to relate to, despite the progressive and subtle breakdown in his storytelling (this was also amazing structurally). He therefore seemed far more real, but at the same time I could see his faults where he overlooked things about himself and other people. But sometimes he did too, which, again, endeared his character to me more because it's something that happens so much to myself.

This novel doesn't really have a storyline, but even so I got through the book very quickly. The jumping chapter lengths, while adding a great affect to the narrative, did slow me down a few times. However, the writing is still easily readable.

I kept thinking about my review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time when writing this, and just like then, I feel like The Shock of the Fall is a book that everyone reads at some point. Not only is it an amazingly interesting book, but it's also incredibly honest and realistic about taboos in society. Everyone should read this. Everyone.

Image Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/

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