Asyndeton, n., the rhetorical figure whereby conjunctions are omitted from a series of related clauses. This is the one weapon in O'Farrell's armoury, and she beats us over the head with it.

It is cutting, sharp, unpredictable.

It gave him a sensation of lightness, of safety, of being entirely held and treasured.

sharp, clubbed, jabbing pain

A thread of honey stretches from comb to pot, widening, twisting.

He is imagining liaisons after tutoring, a walk in the woods, a meeting behind one of these sheds or outhouses.

It is said that she is strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad.

He expects her to be impressed, to nod deferentially. A learned man is he; a man of letters, of education.

The grip is firm, insistent, oddly intimate, on the edge of painful.

the aroma of wood, of lime, of something sweet and fibrous

to look into the bird's face, to see that eye, to know what lies behind that hood

He sees again, and for a moment, the wet churchyard, the dripping yew trees, the dark maw of the ground

He gropes around himself and finds several round objects, tight-skinned, cool, a spike at their centre

He brings one up to his face and inhales the scent, sharp, specific, acidic.

She has the expression of a woman reading a particularly hard piece of text, a woman trying to decipher something, to work something out.

She frowns; she looks at him directly, searchingly.

‘What is it?’ he says, suddenly disquieted by her, her silence, her concentration, her grip on his hand.

She releases his hand, which again feels raw, peeled, ravaged.

He feels the twin plushness of her lips, the hard press of her teeth, the impossible smoothness of the skin of her face.

the light beyond is dazzling, white, overwhelming.

He is so stupefied, by the kiss, by the apple store, by the remembered feel of her shoulders, by plans of what he will do next time

The trees could be seen from the back windows, tossing their restless heads on windy days, shaking their bare and twisted fists in winter.

The girl and her brother were born feeling the pull of the forest, its beckoning power.

And that's just the first 43 pages.

This feels like a book that shouldn't exist. I could more easily believe that a non-reader, coerced into writing, put it out than someone whose vocation is the English language; the prose is that uniformly grey and flat-footed. The combination of the present tense and the crashing obviousness of the authorial eye took me back to reading Fighting Fantasy books as a kid ('A troll assails you as you cross the enchanted bridge.').

The sex scenes are also turbo corny. Only an authoress could get away with

Her figure and form fill out that jerkin in a manner that is distinctly female.

or

She smiles, her lips curving in a way that maddens and delights him, all at the same time.

There's another one with an hilariously misguided cinematic set-up: the paragraph begins with a row of apples jostling on their shelf in the storehouse.

I gave up on Hamnet around page 90 when I realised I was looking for excuses not to pick it up.

Hamnet

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