Book review: The memory collector

The Memory Collector by Meg Gardiner

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book started off OK. There was a mystery about what had caused an airline passenger to go berserk on board a plane, and whatever it was seemed dangerous and possibly contagious. But after the first fifty pages or so, the plot seemed to come unravelled.

It reminded me of a book I had bought to read on a plane a few years ago, Temple by Matthew Reilly. Reilly was quite frank about his aim to write an action novel where the action never lets up, and so one improbable scene follows another until it descends into mind-numbing tedium. Well Meg Gardiner writes a little bit more articulately than Reilly (not very difficult) but after one or other character jumped the shark for the fifth or sixth (or was it the seventh?) time, I found myself nodding off to sleep in the middle of some exciting action-packed scene with no clear indication of how or why the characters got there. They simply move from one action scene to another.

Well, you get the picture. If you're on a long plane trip and don't mind dropping off to sleep in the middle of what you're reading, it will do.
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Oh, and while I'm writing about books, NaNoWriMo started yesterday. I'll be giving it a miss this year... again. I'm too busy with non-fiction to spare writing time for fiction. The book I wrote with two co-authors on healing ministry in Zimbabwe is getting closer to publication. And I'm working on another book, on the history of the charismatic renewal movement in southern Africa with Prof John de Gruchy, so my writing time is already pretty fully occupied. I still read trashy novels to unwind, though.

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