Anna's Reviews > Tentacle

There’s a lot happening in the 130 pages of ‘Tentacle’. It flits through many narrative points of view and several points in time, which turn out to be linked in mysterious ways. There are elements of the dystopian, magical, and queer, as well as artistic, environmental, colonialist, and political themes. I appreciated all of these and thought the weird temporal structure of events was well executed. The combination was original and potentially really powerful. However the short length meant that every theme was galloped through at top speed, giving neither reader nor characters time to breathe. The last novel I read, The Will to Battle, advanced its plot slowly and incrementally via extensive dialogue. By contrast, there is hardly any dialogue in ‘Tentacle’ at all; it alternates between internal stream of consciousness and bald statement of events by omniscient third person. Although both approaches have their benefits, the shift from one to the other between novels proved disconcerting. I would have liked ‘Tentacle’ to be longer, so that the intriguing characters and settings could be further developed. There were snapshots of the Dominican Republic in the past and future, which were evocative yet curtailed. The ending inevitably felt abrupt and somewhat arbitrary. (view spoiler)[I was rather disappointed with it, in fact. Acilde opts out of any effort to save the ocean in favour of personal comfort as Giorgio, while the fate of Argenis remains ambiguous. (hide spoiler)] This inconclusiveness made it difficult for me to feel anything substantive about the novel, as if it added up to less than the sum of its very promising parts.