Past Caring

Robert Goddard's Past Caring is a bit hard to categorize.  It's a suspense novel without much suspense.  It's a literary novel with too much of the deadwood that goes with suspense novels.  It's a historical novel with huge stretches set in the present.

Throwing out all the categories, Past Caring is a mostly absorbing read that managed to keep me interested in the life & times of one of the protagonists, a former cabinet minister in England in 1908, a period I have no particular affinity for.  It's a pretty leisurely, slow-paced novel until the climax, when one paragraph suddenly made me feel like I was dropped off a cliff.

Goddard writes well about flawed people trying to overcome their pasts, and I liked that aspect of this novel.  Although Goddard drops the ball a bit, in that Martin talks about an expiation that he never quite makes.  But I think that's a minor structural flaw; probably the biggest problem I had with the book was a tendency to tell the same story from 3 different viewpoints.  Although the differences between accounts are important, I kept wanting the characters to get on with it already; it felt like a lot of padding in an already long book.