Dawn's Reading Blog

I didn’t love Cold Mountain. My mother did and so did my grandmother. The fact that all three of us read the same book is a tribute to it. But I didn’t love it.

Perhaps I’ve become too critical lately because I’m working on editing my own writing. I see my mistakes in other people’s work. What are the mistakes in Cold Mountain? Odd word choices and phrasing. Incidents that happen for no discernible purpose. Improbability.

Odd word choices. I swear he makes words up sometimes or accidentally substitutes a similar sounding word for the correct one. It’s easy enough to do but I wonder no one caught it in editing. I don’t have any examples because I wasn’t going to stop and write them down in the middle of a book, but it was occasionally jarring. My favorite bit of ridiculous phrasing was: As a result, however. As a result, however. Hee hee. It makes me laugh every time.

Incidents that happen for no discernible purpose. This is a quest, and on a quest you will meet people and things will happen. In real life, these characters and happenings would be completely random. But in a book, we expect better. What happens along the way should serve to further or elucidate or illustrate the quest. Things happen to Inman but they leave no mark. He meets people but he doesn’t learn from them.

Improbability. I won’t tell you how many people in this book who are severely shot and left for dead survive. I won’t tell you that because I don’t want to spoil the ending. But whether the last one lives or not, there are still way too many miraculous recoveries for that time period. Remember, this was a time when a bullet in the leg meant almost certain amputation. And amputation frequently led to death. People didn’t survive multiple gun wounds.

Then there’s Ada. She’s never done a day’s work in her life. She’s left alone to starve and nearly does. But then when someone shows up and puts her to work, well, gosh, she just jumps right in and learns and does and suceeds, by God! Doesn’t it seem to you that if she were the sort who was willing and able to learn how to run a farm that she might have tried to pick up a few things on her own before Ruby got there? I was never able to believe in her character. She does exactly what she’s told and only what she’s told. That’s not human nature. You’re either lazy and resisting or you’re industrious and like to be busy. She wasn’t a person, she was a puppet.

Inman is Clint Eastwood. The man can’t go wrong. Put him in a bad situation and he’ll be tough and brave his way out of it. He won’t flinch, won’t worry, won’t die. He’s cardboard.

It took me a while to get into this book but once I did, I enjoyed reading it. I didn’t love it, as I said, but it’s a nice epic tale. There’s beautiful language and the love of the area is obviously sincere. Perhaps the furor over this book has more to do with the movie, which might have been very good. Sometimes a movie is better than a book. The book itself doesn’t seem worth the fuss.