Sufferance: A Novel

The majority of the reason I enjoyed this book is in the prose. There is a really interesting mix of this sort of melancholy tone interspersed with both strange humor and some sinister/forboding moments, all wrapped within a bit of film noir trappings. It almost feels like a few tonal steps away from something like the movie Fargo? It's fascinating to read, even though by the end I thought some of the writing patterns showed themselves a bit too plainly (but were still mostly effective).

I did love the choice to have the POV character never speak. It reminded me of a video game like Half Life or Chrono Trigger, and it added to that noir tone. It also forces the supporting cast to reveal their character a little more freely, I thought it worked extremely well.

The plotting here is very strange as well. It seems like the A plot is a slice of life story of a the struggles of small reserve community, and then the B plot is a grandiose billionaire murder conspiracy. Both are compelling, but I'm not sure that either of them were completely successful. I'm sure there are layers of the allegory I'm missing, but I still wanted to see what would happen next and tore through the last half of the novel, so it certainly worked at some level.

I'll have to add some more Thomas King to my backlog, as this was my first of his and he is clearly a talented writer.

I actually finished this a while ago and forgot to update Goodreads.

This is honestly such a hard book to boil down to a simple number. I found the plot to be slow and maybe even a little uninteresting, however the plot was almost irrelevant though since most of what was interesting in Sufferance was Jeremiah's perspective on the world. He had cynical and sarcastic view that I found to be mostly really funny but also incredibly depressing at times. I didn't care what happened next, but I was always looking forward to seeing what Mr. Camp thought of it.

Not my favorite book and I might hesitate to recommend it to others, but I REALLY want to read more from Thomas King.