see paul haggis- THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT!

book: let the great world spin

author: colum mccann

completion date: 12/07/10

method: borrowed (mum)

ok hands up if you remember that awful movie written by paul haggis. you know the one about how racism exists in all of us and how we're all really really racist s.o.b.'s? i do. remember how it won an oscar instead of being laughed out of theatres? I DO. paul haggis was trying to create a sequence of characters that worked together to create a story that happens over a period of a few days to these few people. it didn't work because they were all shallow stock characters that you felt nothing for at all. mccann does exactly what haggis tried to do, and he executes it brilliantly.

i think that the key difference is that everything in let the great world spin circles around one event- philippe petit's walk across the twin towers. this decision is fabulous because of two things: fist that this was a real event. petit strung a wire across the top of the world trade centre towers and walked, ran and lay down on it. watch man on a wire. its great. beautiful really. the event is so intense and surreal that it makes everything that happens to the characters monumental.

second- that this book was published after the fall of the towers. this event was just so devastating to us that to have a current (the book was published 2009) novel revolve around such an intense moment for these towers it really personalizes the novel even though it is set shortly after the vietnam war.

what this novel does so well is it fleshes out each of its narrators. each narrator has a distinct voice which speaks to mccann's skill as an author. he creates these voices with ease and distinction. i can see why this was mum's favourite book of the year, and why this american life has been suggesting it as an audio book. it was just such a perfectly constructed novel, i want to leave it on people's doorsteps so they can read and love it too.

xo-ellebee