The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

[pamela]

The Pursuit of William Abbey was all fur coat and no knickers. North writes beautifully, and there's some really confronting moments of body horror that were just amazingly written, but my main takeaway from the book was that it was boring. I skim read huge chunks of it and didn't feel like I was missing out. It's such a shame because the concept is great. I just felt like it was a work that gives the illusion of depth that it simply didn't have.

The pacing is methodical. We hear the story of William Abbey from Abbey himself, and so it reads like a list events, rather than giving the reader an experience. The result is that The Pursuit of William Abbey is 90% exposition and it made me feel like North just wanted to show off the historical research she's done rather than write a compelling story. It was stories being told within stories, with very little of substance to say.

I guess the subtext is for the British to confront the truth about their colonial past, but for something meant to be revising that history, The Pursuit of William Abbey fell into a lot of "colonial traps". The fact that Abbey has to keep moving meant that the cultures and lived history of the people in the countries he passed through we're never properly explored or represented - except through the eyes of a white, British coloniser. Sure, he's sympathetic, but he's still the only voice for colonised peoples resulting in a narrative that didn't truly seek to delve into what it meant to be a colonised people.

Abbey claims to confront the truth of others, and yet I didn't feel we ever learned much about him. The Pursuit of William Abbey didn't leave me feeling like I'd learned anything, despite being full of big concepts on the surface. Full of melodramatic tragedy, I never learned to care for any of the characters because everything was just so overblown. It's one of the reasons that North's analysis of the nature of truth rang so hollow.

Overall, The Pursuit of William Abbey was a well-written book, but not a particularly engaging one. From a technical standpoint it's well worth picking up, but ultimately I felt it lacked any real depth.