A Most Unusual Love Story | The Poet of Loch Ness

It's just not poetic enough for me... | The Poet of Loch Ness | Brian Jay Corrigan

books:


	• The Poet of Loch Ness Brian Jay Corrigan Thomas Dunne Books, 2005 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 71 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

bittersweet

I enjoyed this book, but it's not one I would read several times. As a person who loves sad songs (like Operator by Jim Croce, etc), this book fit into that style for me. Love stories and other romances take me away to another place, because many times they are not true to life. As I read this book, I was sad and torn and happy...I realized that the whole situation is TOTALLY something real...real love, real disappointment.

That is what sets this book apart from other love stories. Did it end the way had anticipated? Perhaps not. Did it end realisticly? It certainly did, and I have to admire that very much!

for more information click here

A Most Unusual Love Story

Perdita Miggs, seventeen years out of university, considers herself "not unhappy" and looks on her absent-minded professor husband, Perry, with a mixture of love and despair. Perry, who has barely achieved tenure at a small college, has--amazingly--obtained a major grant to study the fauna of Loch Ness in Scotland. And so, the couple pack their things and prepare to go. Then, by further amazing coincidence, the guide he hires for their explorations turns out to be Andrew Macgruer, Perdita's old flame and one true love from her university days. Andrew was once a promising academic but has left wife and career to roam about the highlands, taking yankee "monster hunters" on memorable tours. Well, that's the apparent plot, but there is another, hidden plot, which I won't reveal, of course. You'll have to read the book. Let's just say that nothing is as it seems.

As the apparent plot and the real plot unfold, many more characters are introduced including the Loch Ness "monster" herself--the dinosaurian creature who lives below the surface of the loch and who makes brief appearances but only to those who are prepared to see her. All the characters have their own painful dilemmas to resolve, their own struggles with love and loss, and the reader must suffer with all of them as they work out their own redemption, or at least, resolution.

I wanted to love this book. I really tried. I must confess it was a difficult read. Author Corrigan writes in a high-flown literary style with long, rambling sentences, basketfuls of adjectives, stilted dialogue and a smattering of Scots dialect--all obstacles to easy reading. The characters talk to each other in long acadmic speeches about the nature of love, loss, memory and the possibility of redemption. It took me the first half of the book to get hooked into the story. Still, it's a profound book and worth reading. Don't consider it a romance novel, but an extended meditation on the real meaning of love. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

for more information click here

It's just not poetic enough for me...

Judging by the onslaught of five star reviews I gather that I am in the minority here, but a few other reviewers have, as I have, questioned the validity of those five star ratings. When I put down `The Poet of Loch Ness' I had a very similar feeling as to the one I experienced when I finished reading `The Lovely Bones'; a sort of disappointment.

Well, not sort of. I was disappointed.

The book tells the story of Perdita Miggs, who is on a work related vacation to Scotland with her husband Perry. I don't really want to go into the whole thing since it's been explained by many reviewers in detail, but I'll say a few things.

The real story starts when Andrew Magruer comes into their lives though, or should I say `reenters'. Perdita and Andrew were once in love, and her fond memories of their passion leads her down a seemingly dark path of love and lust and adultery. Don't misread my comment, for this is not a dramatic examination of the interweaving consequences of infidelity, but more a breezy and somewhat simple `love story'. I guess maybe I'm not one for this kind of `romance' but there was just something about `The Poet of Lock Ness' that seemed to be missing.

From everything that I read about this novel I expected it to move with this grace and elegance of, well, poetry. It doesn't though. Yes, it moves along (I read this in it's entirety in one day), but just because it moves at a quick pace doesn't mean that it floats the way that it should have. I remember when I read `Eucalyptus' by Murray Bail and I remember being in awe of his delicate and poetic writing. Sure, the novel was a tad too wordy in some places, but his style made up for it. Corrigan lacks that poetic style that would have suited his prose a little better. He comes off amateurish in my eyes.

As far as the resulting story is concerned, `The Poet of Loch Ness' has its good and bad points. I really liked the relationship building between Perdita and Andrew. I found it intriguing; I just wish it had been written better. In the end I fell in love with Perry, even if for the most part of the novel he appears to be ridiculous in every sort of way. The side story of the two sisters Caitlin and Kira and their love triangle is entertaining and left me almost wishing they had been to focal point of the novel. In the final moments of the novel the book falls into clichés (maybe their really aren't any new ideas out there) but part of the revelation that is Perry kind of breaks the mold and causes us to forgive the cliché that is Perdita.

In the end the biggest fault I can find with `The Poet of Loch Ness' is the poet himself, Jay Corrigan, who wound up being not much of a poet after all.

for more information click here

How far would you go to make your lover's dreams come true? Spirited Perdita Miggs is thrilled when her bland marine-biologist husband, Perry, gets a grant to spend the summer studying Loch Ness. Home to her alma mater, Scotland is also the place where seventeen years ago Perdita fell in love with Highland poet Andrew Macgruer. At the bed-and-breakfast where Perdita and Perry are staying lives an eccentric pair of sisters, Kira and Catitlìn. Among the unexpected guests are Breton Trent, Kira's old flame, and Andrew, whose allure has only improved with age. Recognizing in Kira's thwarted love an example of her own, Perdita works to bring the couple together again. In the process she finds herself growing ever closer to Andrew. Perry's subsequent anguish, however, incidentally coincides with an illness that seems to affect her heart. As three sets of love triangles hurtle toward final conclusions, the marine biologist's quest for the legendary creature of Loch Ness becomes the central metaphor for the secrets that glide beneath the surface of us all.

for more information click here