Reviews tagging 'Suicide attempt'

Amnesty by Lara Elena Donnelly

1 review

syliu's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

“I am only trying to understand. All my life I have worked hard, done well, given others everything they asked from me. And I get nowhere. I get nothing. Cyril DePaul has betrayed, failed … he has floundered through his life. You were famous, and wealthy, and you threw away everything for him.” 
“Yes,” said Aristide, and though he was drunk, anger made his diction sharp as broken glass and dragged the sibilance across it into tatters. “Twice.”

I think I misunderstood what Amberlough is about. All the dazzling lights of the first volume were exposition for a much more serious story about atonement and the way our actions shape us. Reading the first book of the trilogy was like shining a spotlight upon the cast at their best moments; beautiful and cunning; with all their clever implements finely honed. They were a mystery, their pasts and motivations unclear, but they were endearing and I desperately wanted to follow them where they went next, into exile or incarceration. The rest of the series revolves around the first volume, unable to leave its orbit, but the first volume also seems inconsequential next to the exhausted tragedy of the later chapters. 

It’s rare for a book/series (Amnesty in particular) to really make me sit and contemplate what it means to love someone and idealise them for years on end, and to reckon with the serrated edge of change and dashed expectations. How do we live while saddled with simultaneous yearning and regret for the past? Never have I felt the loss of a past life in tandem with a book’s characters as acutely as I did here. And throughout Armistice and Amnesty there was a keen sense of the long stretch of time that encompasses the human experience, far more heavy and somber than any present moment or highlight. 

The very concept of Amberlough is fascinating: a person who starts with nothing in life, who uses their smarts to get everything they could ever want and never get caught nor humbled. Sacrificing it all for someone born wanting for nothing but who ended up losing everything. Two people so deeply embroiled in politics with no saving principles of their own, inclined to selfishness and laziness. It’s miraculous that any positive emotion could blossom between them, yet it seems perfect and inevitable that it does, once they are stripped of all the glamour and pride they shielded themselves with.  

Vague and fanciful reflections aside, man I love Aristide’s theatrical antics, no matter how pathetic they are. And Cyril’s gallows humour made me crack up as often as I felt pangs of grief.

I also have to mention that Armistice and Amnesty pulled off commentary on our real patriarchal society by constructing a fictional matriarchy very subtly and successfully — a rare feat. Daoud was so clearly beaten by the oppressive socialisation of his culture, made meek and confined to a life of ambitionless servitude. Juxtapose that with the curt superiority of Pulan, Lilian, and two female presidential candidates…there’s a striking power dynamic. 

I will certainly have to reread the first volume, and I’ll never be able to see it the same way knowing what comes after.

The instant before death would be worse than another thirty, forty, fifty years of guilt because in that instant an infinity of failures would unfurl before him: all the things he might have done and would now never do. All the opportunities to do better that he would turn away, in paying a symbolic price for past wrongdoing.
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