The Service of Clouds (1997) by Delia Falconer.
Good Reads meta-data is 322 pages, rated 3.49 by 240 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit.
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: Bloodless.
Tagline: In the mists.
Spoiler: For ten years she waited for him to…do something. Then he did; he married someone else.
It starts about 1907 when the Hydro Majestic Hotel was being built and ends around 1926, detailing aspects of life in the Blue Mountains, particularly Katoomba, in that period. He is a photographer who seeks the face of God in the clouds and hopes that through the aperture of the camera lens he will have a divine experience. She is of a more practical turn on mind, but she aids and abets him for years, and every time their hands touch or one jostles another in setting up or moving a camera she has a mental organism, or so it seems with the profusion of metaphors that follow.
Years (and pages) later, after he marries another, she turns her attention to an older tubercular man and sex rears its head, sort of. Sometimes it is hard to tell what is going on because the prose is slathered so heavily on that the cake disappears under the icing. It is lyrical and poetic, and the effort shows.
The result is elliptical and vague; just the sort of prose favoured by the jaded panelists of literary awards, not by readers who get lost in the undergrowth, darkened by a heavy canopy of words, who lose sight of the main point(s), if there are any. With all of the forced imagery and unusual vocabulary, most readers will never quite connect with the protagonists: Form over content, thy name is post modernity.
The intense and relentless imagery is out of proportion to the unrequited love story. Reminded this cynic of some of the multimillion dollars productions from Hollywood like Valerian… (2017). Enormous show, and zero go.
It is resonant with Anne Michaels’s elegiac Fugitive Pieces (1996) but lacks that novel’s moral core.
Got it at the Megalong Bookshop while in Katoomba a time ago. I chose it because it seemed to be centred on Mark Foy’s hotel, the Hydro Majestic where we have stayed several times. My mistake.