A Revolution Of The Sun

Quite a difficult book to read as different characters keep appearing and leaving one wondering how and when they might ever get together. Clever in that Tim Pears manages to keep a grasp on all of them and eventually there is an amazing drawing together.

It was a temptation for me not to review this novel simply because, after reading it, I've no idea what it's "about", per se: It's all very scattershot, thematically speaking. But, as no other Amazon reviewer has bothered to give it a whirl, here's my take on it:We're all acquainted with the book - of which Joyce's Ulysses is the example par excellence - which encapsulates the lives of the characters through their peregrinations of one 24 hour period, a rotation of the Earth. This very odd novel stretches to a year, or, as the title would have it, a revolution of the Sun.All the characters herein are decidedly offbeat and bear great afflictions of one form or the other. Whatever this book may be "about", it is emphatically NOT about stolid Middle-Class burghers living out humdrum existences. We come to know an amnesiac whose name, Sam Caine, is an anagram of "amnesiac", an escalading female burglar, a Tory MP who blinks every time he tells a brazen lie, all thrown together in rave parties, long-haul trucking cum astronomy lessons, and a vivisection lab.The anti-vivisection sympathies in the book are as close as one comes to an overarching theme. But the effect the book has on the reader is, in the end, to make all these people whose lives intertwine throughout the year in question,1997, seem rather normal and indeed very human.The book is also filled with little drolleries like this one illustrating the point:"The psychiatrists were right: an enormous number of ordinary people out there were nuts."The reason that this declaration is so droll is that the converse shows itself to be true in the end: An enormous number of people we call nuts, are really very human, damaged, sensitive people, whom we are better off coming to know and perhaps love than not in our short life-spans.That's what I came away with from the book, a heightened sympathy for the damaged and bereaved, in whatever form. The cosmological questions that permeate the book are perhaps better left to some other reviewer or, indeed, some other form of life.