Sara’s Face by Melvin Burgess
Nov. 30th, 2008 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
"There's loads of girls prettier than me. Anyone can look good. Talent - that's not it, either. Everyone's got talent. They train you up, they work on your voice. If it's no good they change it in the studio. Talent's cheap."
Sara wants to be famous, and when the legendary rock star Jonathan Heat offers to train her up and pay for her cosmetic surgery, it's like a dream come true. But what if there's a hidden price? And is Sara willing to pay it?
Sara is a damaged girl who dreams of fame and fortune. Prone to fantasies, anorexia and self-harming, her big break comes when she meets rock star Jonathan Heat at her local hospital, where she's being treated after an accident with an iron leaves a triangular scar on her otherwise beautiful face. Heat is disfigured himself as a result of excessive cosmetic surgery that has led to his face collapsing in on itself and constantly wears a mask when out in public. He takes Sara to his mansion, promising to fix her facial scars and give her the other cosmetic surgery that she's convinced she requires to be beautiful. Once at the mansion however, she claims that she can see the ghost of a girl with no face - a girl who otherwise looks exactly like her.
The big problem with this book is that there is simply too much going on. Burgess wants this to be a commentary on the obsession with celebrity, beauty and cosmetic surgery and there's certainly a timely feel to his notion of face transplants. However, he also wants it to be a ghost story and there are allusions to the legend of Bluebeard throughout the story and the novel simply isn't long enough for these to be handled in a satisfactory manner. For the story to work, Sara has to be a character you can empathise with, but she's so morally ambiguous - telling different stories to different characters - that it's difficult to get a handle on her, so whilst she is obviously tremendously damaged it's difficult to sympathise with that. Likewise, Burgess paints Heat in ambiguous tones - as a damaged individual in his own right, he could be a sympathetic villain, but isn't on the page long enough to make much of an impression and he's seen mainly through the eyes of others. Similarly, there isn't enough of the sinister Dr Kaye, the cosmetic surgeon who Heat claims was the driving force behind his operations and who seems to have met a sticky, but unspecified, end.
The narrative style hinders the story and makes it difficult to buy into. Burgess goes for the conceit that he is writing the novel as himself, but that this is a fictionalising of real events that the reader will already be familiar with. It makes for an artificial structure in that he often has to explain things that really the reader should already know. In addition, because he adopts a third person omniscient POV to the overall narration, he constantly editorialises on the events, drawing in things that happen later or are happening simultaneously elsewhere, which can make the story feel rather disjointed. There are sections told as recreations of video tapes that Sara has made and interviews with witnesses to the events, but the effect is to bring in a mish-mash of styles that further dilute the strength of Sara's story. The epilogue feels rather tacked on, an attempt to explain things that Burgess was unable to otherwise deal with in the main arc of the story and I felt rather cheated that the story itself ends at a dramatic moment, without any explanation for how it all got resolved. Side characters such as Mark, the luckless teenage boy who loves Sara for who she is and Bernadette, a nurse at Heat's mansion, appear and disappear as convenient for the story, and don't really get an end to their own arcs, while there's too little information on Sara's home life and how it might have brought her to this, beyond an explanation that her mum is "ditzy".
I think that if the book had been twice its length, Burgess could have done something truly original and fulfilling with his subject matter. As it is, although it's a brave attempt at doing something different in the YA genre, ultimately it doesn't come off.
The Verdict:
It's a brave attempt to do something different, but there's too much going on for it to work satisfactorily. As a result, it's not on a par with Burgess's other work.
Sara wants to be famous, and when the legendary rock star Jonathan Heat offers to train her up and pay for her cosmetic surgery, it's like a dream come true. But what if there's a hidden price? And is Sara willing to pay it?
Sara is a damaged girl who dreams of fame and fortune. Prone to fantasies, anorexia and self-harming, her big break comes when she meets rock star Jonathan Heat at her local hospital, where she's being treated after an accident with an iron leaves a triangular scar on her otherwise beautiful face. Heat is disfigured himself as a result of excessive cosmetic surgery that has led to his face collapsing in on itself and constantly wears a mask when out in public. He takes Sara to his mansion, promising to fix her facial scars and give her the other cosmetic surgery that she's convinced she requires to be beautiful. Once at the mansion however, she claims that she can see the ghost of a girl with no face - a girl who otherwise looks exactly like her.
The big problem with this book is that there is simply too much going on. Burgess wants this to be a commentary on the obsession with celebrity, beauty and cosmetic surgery and there's certainly a timely feel to his notion of face transplants. However, he also wants it to be a ghost story and there are allusions to the legend of Bluebeard throughout the story and the novel simply isn't long enough for these to be handled in a satisfactory manner. For the story to work, Sara has to be a character you can empathise with, but she's so morally ambiguous - telling different stories to different characters - that it's difficult to get a handle on her, so whilst she is obviously tremendously damaged it's difficult to sympathise with that. Likewise, Burgess paints Heat in ambiguous tones - as a damaged individual in his own right, he could be a sympathetic villain, but isn't on the page long enough to make much of an impression and he's seen mainly through the eyes of others. Similarly, there isn't enough of the sinister Dr Kaye, the cosmetic surgeon who Heat claims was the driving force behind his operations and who seems to have met a sticky, but unspecified, end.
The narrative style hinders the story and makes it difficult to buy into. Burgess goes for the conceit that he is writing the novel as himself, but that this is a fictionalising of real events that the reader will already be familiar with. It makes for an artificial structure in that he often has to explain things that really the reader should already know. In addition, because he adopts a third person omniscient POV to the overall narration, he constantly editorialises on the events, drawing in things that happen later or are happening simultaneously elsewhere, which can make the story feel rather disjointed. There are sections told as recreations of video tapes that Sara has made and interviews with witnesses to the events, but the effect is to bring in a mish-mash of styles that further dilute the strength of Sara's story. The epilogue feels rather tacked on, an attempt to explain things that Burgess was unable to otherwise deal with in the main arc of the story and I felt rather cheated that the story itself ends at a dramatic moment, without any explanation for how it all got resolved. Side characters such as Mark, the luckless teenage boy who loves Sara for who she is and Bernadette, a nurse at Heat's mansion, appear and disappear as convenient for the story, and don't really get an end to their own arcs, while there's too little information on Sara's home life and how it might have brought her to this, beyond an explanation that her mum is "ditzy".
I think that if the book had been twice its length, Burgess could have done something truly original and fulfilling with his subject matter. As it is, although it's a brave attempt at doing something different in the YA genre, ultimately it doesn't come off.
The Verdict:
It's a brave attempt to do something different, but there's too much going on for it to work satisfactorily. As a result, it's not on a par with Burgess's other work.
