This string of events I have recounted has left me with a belief that we are indeed at the end of the world. I am only waiting for it to happen now; indeed, preparing for it. Normally one would imagine that such a conviction would lead to despair, but strangely enough, instead of despair, I feel liberated. I feel lighter since I have resigned myself to live this way… (from The Scatter Here is Too Great)

I read this book wrong. I get a short book, I assume it’s meant to be read quickly, gulped down like me trying to eat a cookie before Tesfa notices me doing so and asks to share. This isn’t a book that’s meant to be gulped. It’s a book meant to be savoured, but I doubt you could find anyone who didn’t do like me and read the book up as quickly as possible. You can’t not – you read and you read and you read and suddenly you’re done and you realise because you’ve blown through this whole thing because you’ve become addicted to Bilal Tanweer.

What is it about: Intertwined stories about a bomb going off in Karachi. A simplistic sentence that does nothing other than give a framework to the novel. The bomb is there but this isn’t a book about a bombing. This isn’t a novel with the bomber’s point-of-view giving us his reasons or his politics or his religion. For a novel whose central conceit is a terrorist event, it’s surprisingly light, almost sparse, rather than being bogged down in accusations or justification for anyone’s actions. The bomb is there and the people are there, where the people are a group of family, friends, and neighbours, all tied somehow to the bomb going off at Cantt Station, Karachi, during rush hour. But again, that’s too simplified. I don’t want to say the novel is intricately constructed because that makes it sound like it’s some sort of tricky mystery and I don’t want to say that the novel is taut because that makes it sound stressful and I don’t want to say exact or precise because that makes it sound like a factual rendering. So I will say, and I mean this in a wondrously complementary way, you can not strip away anything to summarize the novel because Tanweer (I want to call him Bilal and pretend we are friends but I think that might be a little presumptuous of me) has balanced the novel already perfectly on a fulcrum. One less word and we collapse. One more and we tumble down. I can not add anything to describe The Scatter Here is Too Great, nor can I strip words out to give an adequate summary.

The Scatter is Too Great has no manipulation, religious or political. No overt condemnation of ideals, conflicting or matching. There’s something really pure and really true about this novel made up of stories. We meet people, they fade out, they reappear as secondary characters in other stories, they come back as protagonists in later ones, they fade away again. And the momentum, as I said earlier, pulls you along to the end when you realise there’s more here than you thought, that you should have slowed down, a focused meditation on each word. Nothing is wasted here. Nothing is extraneous. It really, just, simply, works.

Sometimes it’s easier to review books I disliked or books with which I had some weird emotional relationship. It’s harder to review books that are like a clear ting of a tuning fork, because there is nothing I can write that the book itself doesn’t already do better than I could.

It’s not a long read. You should go read it.

The Scatter Here is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer went on sale August 14th, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Way way back in the heady days of September 2014 (where have the past fifty days gone?), when I went onto Netgalley for the first time in three-or-so years, the one book that I was most excited to request was Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe; readers with a good memory will recall how effusive I am regarding The Rotters’ Club. I love The Rotters’ Club and I recommend it to people and no one I know has the same love as I do for this book, but still, it is one of my all-time favourite books ever. I could live in The Rotters’ Club if I had to.

Can the same be said for Expo 58? Would I live inside Expo 58 if I could?

Likely no.

There is nothing really wrong with Expo 58. I can’t pull out, like in some of my other netgalley-acquired reviews over-written or over-wrought quotations to back up my point. I could say that the dénouement was a little too pat for my tastes, but, by the end of this quick book (my copy had under three hundred pages), I didn’t mind having the final pages wrapped up like a parcel being sent in the mail. I liked Thomas, around whom the story radiates, as a low-level British bureaucrat thrust into international intrigue upon being seconded to Expo 58 in Brussels. I liked Thomas’ international compatriots, although I kept picturing Andrey as an older, middle-aged man than a young, possible Lothario. Even with the clues scattered throughout the text, I didn’t figure out the whodunit, which was a pleasant surprise as I just finished a mystery novel (The Son by Jo Nesbø) where I sussed out the mystery fairly early on. It seems to me that Expo 58 is the sort of novel that would have the words Rollicking good time and Jolly well brilliant emblazoned across the front as blurbs from other big-name authors. I can imagine that if I were British and male and had lived through the 1950s in Britain, when men were men, women were hostesses, and being British meant Something with a capital S, this book would be like cuddling up under a warm blanket with a hot water bottle under ones toes. Even me being none of those things (British, male, lived through the 1950s), I still fancied this book a fair amount. It made me think British-y with British vocabulary and that internal voice inside my head which narrates my life took on an educated, but not too much so, British accent.

But, all that seems to me lukewarm praise. There was nothing wrong with Expo 58, but was it as ascendant as The Rotters’ Club? Of course not. And I can’t get past that. I liked Expo 58, but it wasn’t The Rotters’ Club so I can’t love it. The praise I gave it in the previous paragraph seems forced, like I’m trying to convince myself to like it more. It’s like the nice guy of books, constantly needling me with Why don’t you like me more Meghan? Aren’t I a nice guy? You go off ranking a bunch of YA novels as five stars? Don’t you know they’ll never please you the way I can?

So I’m sorry Expo 58. You are a good book. You are amusing. You are a great diversion. But I don’t love you and I never will. I’m just being honest.

Expo 58 by by Jonathan Coe went on sale September 2nd, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.