Disclaimer: I know
nothing about writing book reviews.
Let me start off by
saying that I did enjoy Grace McCleen’s The
Professor of Poetry. Published last year, it follows the story of Elizabeth
Stone, an English professor trying to write her academic masterpiece while
recovering from cancer. This project takes her back to Oxford or Cambridge (I
liked that the book never actually specified which) where she did her
undergraduate degree, back to where Edward Hunt, her old English professor,
lives and works. Internally, it takes her, and us, back to her
nineteen-year-old self at university, and back to her childhood.
I liked this simultaneous
unfolding of three plots. Elizabeth is an engaging, well-created, three-dimensional
character, and her past story helps shape her characterisation in the present.
I like that we remember the past as she does. Beyond that, the plot is very
convincing. It’s entirely believable that someone might get to a certain age
and decide that maybe they’d made the wrong decisions in life, prioritised the
wrong things. Elizabeth’s reassessment of her life following her illness is a
plausible and interesting premise for a book.
It’s the writing,
and the ending, which to me let the novel down.