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| Nothing Important Happened Today by Will Carver | |
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| Category: General Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Stephen Leach
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| Summary: Tricky and perplexing, this story about a suicide cult is an unsettling read. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 276 | Date: November 2019 |
| Publisher: Orenda | |
| ISBN: 978-1912374830 | |
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Nothing Important Happened Today is a dark, twisted, difficult read. Stories about cults often are, but this is different; it's written with a sense of style that is quite unlike anything I've read before. I can't remember ever having read a novel with such an odd, distinctive narrative voice. While a slim and relatively small book, the slow-moving nature of the plot makes it feel far larger than its 276 pages.
There are elements of magical realism and the fantastical here, but this is a story set squarely in the world we live in: grubby, gloomy, and often dispiritingly real. The story is broken up into short, rapid chapters, many of which detail the lives of the people who've fallen under the spell of the cult. The reader learns few of their names, but each of them feels like a real person. Cleverly, the short snapshots of their lives create a real sense of anonymous people passing by, those who ordinarily go overlooked, accentuating the pessimistic, deadbeat tone of the story. The sense of anonymity, of the unknown, is incredibly powerful.
This may not be an easy read for everyone (I certainly found it difficult initially) but it didn't take long for the book to draw me in. It's been several days since I finished, and I'm still thinking about it – I've already said this, but it's genuinely quite unlike anything I've read before. I'll be interested to see what other people make of it.
If a little darkness on the page is what you crave, you might enjoy She Who Was No More by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
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