Twilight, But for Soccer Mums — A Review of Deborah Harken’s “A Discovery of Witches”
Written by Corragh-May White, edited by Gemma Kent.
PART ONE: THE VAMPIRE POSSESSETH MANY NAMES
If the word count for this piece had been five words instead of one thousand, then I think the title would have more than sufficed for the review as a whole, as nothing could more eloquently sum up Deborah Harken’s “A Discovery of Witches” as a young-adult vampire romance novel for the middle-aged than to invoke all the angst-riddled sexual repression of the original, and now with way more wrinkle angst and joint pain.
Everything a mother of four needs after she’s put the kids to bed.
The story starts when our middle-aged protagonist Diana, a witch who has shunned magic and lives as a human lecturer of History at Oxford University, finds a long lost magical manuscript in Oxford library with the power to change the world. Other supernatural beings sense her discovery and are out to get her.
Untrained and faced by so many powerful enemies Diana must defend the manuscript from the wrong hands while navigating her forbidden love with a grey-streaked but sexy vampire, Mathew Clairmont.
Sounds good, yes? I thought so too.
Until I got past the blurb and actually started reading. Allow me to correct myself: this piece will be less of a review and more of a record of my journey as I attempted to read what was, by far, the worst book I have ever read.
PART TWO: THINE VAMPIRIC SPEED DOTH DAZZLE, THINE BOOK PACE DOTH TALLY
The pace was the primary fang in my side as I read this novel. It was as slow and as unpleasant as my grandfather’s breathing just before he died of lung cancer.
The action crawls along at a snail’s pace, and no dull insignificant detail was spared in the telling of the main character’s childhood, her university life, her doctorate and finally the events of that morning, drinking coffee and getting dressed, which led her to the university library where, at long last, the action begins.
And then abruptly stops again.
By this stage a good 200 out of the possible 912 pages have passed the reader by and I felt every one of them like an extra year of my life.
Irritatingly slow beginning aside, it is a recurring theme throughout the book that the very second the plot appears to become interesting (a demon tails Diana around the city, a peer betrays her, a prophesy is uncovered) that, instead of attempting to face the problem, the main characters drink wine or do yoga. There are entire pages where the action is forgotten entirely in favour of describing, in minute detail, the exact taste of the wine Diana and Mathew are drinking or the yoga class they are attending, instead of saving the world or something like that.
If I was to make a rough guess, I would say approximately one third of this book is actual plot. I suppose one could argue that this is a method of defusing and increasing the tension, of allowing the reader to learn more about the characters and to develop the relationship between the characters.
If this was Harkness’ intention however, I’m afraid to say she failed miserably: all that her longwinded digressions achieved were intense feelings of frustration in the reader, while painting the main characters as the most boring supernatural beings in existence.
PART THREE: THE VAMPIRE SPEAKETH IN TONGUES
Another source of irritation in this book was how it read like it was originally written in another language then translated, very badly, into English.
By this, I mean that the sentences were often clumsily arranged so they stumbled over my tongue, forcing me to reread them in order to grasp their meaning. Other times, words were used slightly out of context — on a number of occasions, I found myself squinting at the page and muttering, “Deborah, that word does not mean what you think it means”.
The author, much like her main character, is an academic, a historian. Therefore, I reasoned the reason behind the poor use of language must be that Harkness was accustomed to the cold, analytical mode of writing that comes with academia, the more emotional form of fiction writing being foreign to her. But regardless, I double checked her nationality on Wikipedia. She is an American and a native English speaker, just like Diana. Also, like Diana, Harkness changed her degree many times before setting on history and perusing a doctorate and lecturing at Oxford university.
This brings me onto my next grievance.
PART FOUR: TWILIGHT FOR SOCCER MOMS-ETH
After further wiki-ing I discovered that “A Discovery of Witches” is pretty much Harkness’s autobiography. The hobbies and backstory of the main character are almost an exact carbon copy of hers, minus the supernatural elements. Even the description of Diana as having “blond hair, blue eyes, short, athletic figure”, matches the picture of Harkness on the inside cover.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from your own life when writing — if anything, it meant her descriptions of the university tingled with vibrant details. But the two women were the same person.
With this new knowledge in mind, as I continued reading, the book began to sound more and more like one of those sad fanfiction stories on Wattpad: the ones my generation used to read when we were thirteen and utterly misunderstood, written by another sad thirteen-year-old who had placed themselves in the story.
In this case, the story is “Twilight”.
PART FIVE: THE NON-VAMPIRE (PADDY)
My good friend Paddy, due to the brother/sister dynamic of our relationship, naturally loves anything that causes me this much irritation. So, when I ranted to him as I have above (“Five bloody pages on wine! Bloody wine!”) and described my pride at reaching the halfway mark despite how it physically hurt to crawl through this book, he, true to form, replied “Sounds like a fantastic book; I’ll have it finished in a day or two”.
Challenge accepted, my friend.
Day One: I sat down next to Paddy in English. “Well,” I asked expectantly, looking for signs of premature aging. “Oh, I forgot about the wine book. I will read it tonight.”
Day Two: I caught up to Paddy on concourse. “It’s quite good, yeah… it’s good, yeah,” he mutters into his coffee. He will not meet my eyes.
Day Three: I corner Paddy in the library and ask if he’s finished the wine/ yoga book yet. He opens his mouth into a wide arrogant grin, which almost immediately crumbles under the weight of its own lies. The light had faded from his eyes, his shoulders sagged. He is a broken man.
“It’s just …so fucking shit!” Paddy’s desire to best me drove him to the one-hundred-page mark but no further.
Not even his hatred for me was that powerful.
PART SIX: THE VAMPIRE DOTH NOT AGE
In fairness, not being a middle-aged soccer mum, Paddy and I are far from the target audience. Perhaps our mutual dislike of this book stemmed from the fact that we are unable to identify with the struggles of a middle-aged woman, unable to see the attractiveness of a middle-aged man, even if he is a vampire and unable to appreciate the benefits of yoga in fighting early-onset arthritis.
Similarly, the characters cannot express the struggles of a 20-year-old student, except as a distant and half-shrugged at memory. Perhaps this caused me to disconnect from the characters at an early stage, making the flaws of the book more apparent than they would have been. With this in mind, from about page 230 I began to envisage the characters as younger, to see if that would improve my experience.
It did not.
The most frustrating thing about this book is that there is a fantastic plot, tantalisingly close. You feel its breath on your tongue as it strains to push its way through the convoluted language and endless wine descriptions. You can almost smell it in the deliciously dark images and detailed descriptions of magic, ancient rituals, the supernatural and friends-turned-enemies against the setting of the beautiful and ancient city of Oxford (restructure sentence/make it shorter, to improve meaning).
But all this is ruined when, instead of confronting her problems, Diana goes to drink wine with Mathew and forgets about the whole ordeal for a chapter or three.
I have never been defeated by a book before. I battled my crushing boredom and irritation by telling myself that the random trip to France and endless wine had to have some significance that I would discover as I read.
“You spent nine quid on it for Christ’s sake,” I muttered to myself as the pages became more and more difficult to turn.
But by then I had begun to hear the phrase “fruity yet crispy” in my sleep; I knew too much about cholesterol tablets and hair loss creams.
So, with a heavy heart, just over halfway through, I admitted defeat.
PART SEVEN: THE VAMPIRE HATH RISEN ONCE MORE
A few weeks later I had almost forgotten the book that was currently rotting on my top shelf, far away from human contact.
Paddy had learnt to laugh again, and I no longer remembered the correct way to do the Salutation to the Sun position. Life was good.
Then, one dark and rainy evening, the nasally tones of Teresa Palmer grumbled to me from the TV screen, words that seemed somehow familiar. I looked up. She was drinking wine. “Oh no.” “A Discovery of Witches, coming soon to Sky”. “Oh God.” I stared, aghast. Paddy left the room.
The saddest thing is, deep down, I know I am going to watch it, if only to see if Sky somehow managed to scrape enough out of the plot’s mangled corpse to fix what was, without a doubt, the worst book ever to assault my brain.
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