The Town That Forgot How to Breathe, by Kenneth Harvey

The Town that Forgot How to Breathe
Kenneth Harvey

Where, exactly, does a good book go bad? Can the turning point be pointpointed? If so, can the book be saved? Sigh. Unfortunately, it's too late to save The Town That Forgot How to Breathe. It's a shame to watch a book so full of promise, brimming with the author's enthusiasm, fall obscenely short of the mark.

I came across this book quite by accident. Browsing around Barnes and Noble, I happened upon this book, the cover of which quite intrigued me. I read the back of the cover. Oooh, I thought. Sounds scary like. Sea monsters? An unknown illness? Ghosts? Count me in!

And, for awhile, it was good. Until Harvey felt that he needed to add a lesson to his story; and I'm certainly not saying lessons are bad--I'm a teacher, of course I think lessons are good--but when the lesson appears with all the subtlety of a meat cleaver....well, then, lessons are bad.

The story revolves around a small Newfoundland town, whose sleepy residents are jarred into reality when things start going screwy. First, people begin succumbing to a mysterious illness in which people stop breathing. More precisely, they forget to breathe. Then, peculiar creatures come forth from the sea. Bodies expelled from the bay are years dead, yet perfectly preserved. Ghosts appear. Like I said, sounds interesting, right? Well just wait.

A major problem with the novel is that several noteworthy elements (which you would expect to be intricately linked to the message, the monsters, or SOMETHING) are simply dropped, as if the text ran away from the author. It seems as if the novel is itself a hydra (another dropped idea) that Harvey lost the ability to control midway through. And you can hardly blame him: he weaves such a tapistry of countless characters, events, omens, and spooky imagery that he cannot possibly develop them all. Too bad.

And then there's The Lesson, the other major problem with the book. It seems that Harvey intends a lengthy sermon on the evils of modernity. And this he delivers, again and again...and again. It finally becomes so heavy-handed that it was all I could do to finish the damn thing. The second half of the book was sacrificed to reinforcing the point (ad nauseum), so the ending could be spyed a million miles away. That's no fun. Unfortunately, the end of the novel is a jumbled mess of technological mish-mash, pompous sermonizing, and bland predicitability.

Illuminatng? Sure--but I'll save you the trouble: our modern age is awful; it disassociates us from our past and our roots. And apparently electricity is REALLY bad. So go live with the Amish--it's better than reading this book, anyway.

In a nutshell: At first intriguing, then just plain annoying, The Town that Forgot how to Breathe perfectly illustrates wasted potential. Coulda been a really good one...

Bibliolatry Scale: 1.5 out of 6 stars