Book Review: "Luckenbooth" by Jenni Fagan

Normally when I see a dark fantasy book, it does one of two things. The first thing it does is it takes me back to my school days when I would read “The Vampire Chronicles” and other gothic masterpieces until my life became nothing but a walking shadow. The second thing it could do is annoy the living daylights out of me because it is written so incredibly cliché. I was quite surprised to see that this book - “Luckenbooth” by Jenni Fagan, has managed to do both at the same time and honestly, as much as I would like to say that I enjoyed every bit of it, as I moved through the book, there were definitely things that I found either problematic, jarring or rather badly written. The concept itself though, is pretty incredible and some of the language is brilliant, magical and often at times, uncomfortable. I am clearly in two minds about this book but, as I have read other reviews on it - I see that I am not alone in my inability to make up my mind over whether this book is actually any good.

The book starts off with three characters in three different time periods: Jessie in 1910, Flora in 1928 and Levi in 1939. Now, when the book begins with Jessie telling us that she is the daughter of the devil and sails a coffin to the shore, we can definitely see that this is going to be one dark book. The writing of Jessie’s narrative is immaculate and filled with this overwhelming sense of dread, an impending doom that never leaves the reader. Flora’s narrative is a little less so. Sometimes, I feel as if the reader can almost see straight through Flora, as if she does not matter as much as Jessie and yet, has approximately the same amount of value according to the narrative of the book. The way in which she is presented is, more than often, conflating in views. She is both beautiful and ugly at the same time in appearance and both is self-destructive and seems to have a purpose. Though the piece is well-written, I did not feel like she was a life-changing character. When we get to Levi’s part it gets even worse. Levi is a Black man from America and comes to Scotland in the 30s to work in the Bone Library - his narrative consists of letters to his brother Leo. The one thing I did not like about Levi’s narrative is that at times he seemed like a bit of a stereotype. His character had not been well researched. The next set of characters seem to have similar issues.

In terms of themes, I do think there was a lot of attention paid to social aspects and injustices such as poverty, sexism and racism. However, simply addressing that these problems exist is really not enough. There was only one part where I saw that injustice was woven into the story and that was when one character wanted to be an assassin but was a girl and so, had to justify herself. I was really on the fence, however, at how the book portrayed these different social issues, especially when it came to characters of colour.

In conclusion I would like to say that I neither hate nor love this book. I found parts of it a bit jarring yes, but there were also parts of it that were written beautifully. It is an ambitious book and maybe a bit overly ambitious in terms of the message it wants to send out. But, every few pages or so, there seems to be a cliché or two and that disturbs the momentum. I think that this book should have been revised once or twice more before being published. But the concept itself is mind-blowing and therefore, you should definitely take the time out to read it for yourself and judge whether you think differently to me.