East of the Sun Book

Julia Gregson's East of the Sun was an emotional read. It invoked boredom, annoyance, and frustration pretty quickly. The story is about three young women embarking to India. Rose is marrying a man she barely knows. Her best friend Tor is accompanying Rose officially as her bridesmaid but chiefly to secure a marriage of her own. And finally their chaperone, Viva, who returns to India to reclaim something of her past.

We get the points of view of all these characters, as well as, Rose's fiancé, Jack. None of the points of view differ much from the other. One would have easily sufficed considering the scant storyline. This is just one of the instances where Gregson denies her novel clarity in pursuit of complexity and high page count. The novel boasts hundreds of pages of pointless descriptions. Hairstyles, drinks, meals, shopping trips, parties are detailed by the girls adding nothing to the plot. At one point one of her characters even tells another, "less is more", the irony is grating. And after suffering every description'nothing happens. Here are three girls unprepared for the harsh realities of India at a revolutionary time, and when something that can be considered plot (finally) materializes, its not only expected but only casually mentioned before we move on to more needless descriptions.

For the first time in my life I'm actually angry at an author for producing such a pointless timesuck, but perhaps this book is your type of thing, so here are some quotes to allow the novel to speak for itself:

The character Viva, an aspiring writer, describes the sea: " The sea: long glistening hollows laced with creamy foam; broken ice creams, clamor, bang, smack of waves. Reptilian hiss of a ship as it glides through the sea."

In another quote the girls approach the shoreline: "Together they looked out at a faint necklace of lights across a dark and crinkling sea. A foreign town where a foreign people were cleaning their teeth and washing up their supper dishes and thinking about going to bed."

Gregson describes a dessert cart: "the pudding trolley arrived bearing lemon meringue pies and fruit jellies, an apple soufflé, ice creams and the Indian jublies, which she found a little sickly."

If that sounds like something you can stomach, I can only interject that Gregson rambles on in such a manner for six hundred plus pages and I conclude by not recommending this book to anyone who hasn't harmed me in some way.