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Gem claude black butler12/9/2023 In fact I could imagine this could be a rather frustrating read for some people, there is a plot but it’s built one the smallest moments of near silence. Bullough seems to want this to be a really slow building novel, the smallest tensions slowly appearing leading up to the novels conclusion, one that is so open ended it may frustrate some readers. I won’t say what happens after because you need to follow the journey there but I will say that it takes quite a long time to get to this point. Yet these two polar opposite families have to communicate, there is an interesting mix of both competition and understanding in part, and in doing so Robin and Andrew meet and a form of friendship seems to spark. Robin’s family being ‘ex-hippies’ who have come to set up a stable life, and Andrews family who appear to have the external physically stable world and yet behind that facade is a crumbling world of madness and abuse. For me as a reader this almost became a metaphor for the two families involved in the story being so polar opposite to one another. Claude glasses were created in the late 18 th century as a way of seeing the world framed and, due to mirrored glass being tinted a dark colour, making everything look rather other worldly and eerily beautiful. So what is a Claude glass and what is its relevance in the book? Well in part it is pivotal in the ending of the novel, which I won’t give away, but it is also rather symbolic. It was the animal at the door with the yellow eyes, the face that had gawped at him in the room with the pattern for a floor, these people in the yard, calling his name periodically, hunting him down to his den.’ It scared him in ways that he couldn’t hold in his mind. Thunder grew in him, as it grew in the air and the wind around them. He had known for some time – in the same way that he knew when he was hungry, or when he needed to go to sleep. ‘Andrew knew already that it was going to thunder. His father Philip is clearly in need of some anger management therapy and his mother Dora spends her days pretending to cook in a kitchen that has barely been cleaned in years. Andrew however is almost feral he can barely speak, never washes and in fact lives in the crumbling uninhabitable part of the farm hidden behind its pleasant facade. They aren’t wealthy but they seem happy living the life they had idolised. Robin is brought up in a comfortable, if slightly controlled, environment with his seemingly new age parents, who seem to prefer to have their children call them Tara and Adam (which confused me at first) than Mum and Dad. Both aged seven years old Robin and Andrew, who live on the neighbouring farms of Ty’n-y-coed and Werndunvan in Wales, couldn’t be more different. ‘The Claude Glass’ has the story of two boys at its heart. Sort of Books, paperback, 2007, fiction, 201 pages, borrowed from the library
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