In the Orchard, the Swallows
Peter Hobbs
In the Orchard, the Swallows
In the foothills of a mountain range in northern Pakistan is a beautiful orchard. Swallows wheel and dive silently over the branches, and the scent of jasmine threads through the air. Pomegranates hang heavy, their skins darkening to a deep crimson. Neglected now, the trees are beginning to grow wild, their fruit left to spoil on the branches. Many miles away, a frail young man is flung out of prison gates. Looking up, scanning the horizon for swallows in flight, he stumbles and collapses in the roadside dust. His ravaged body tells the story of fifteen years of brutality.
3.6 out of 5 based on 10 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
160 |
| RRP |
£10.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-0571279272 |
| Publisher |
Faber and Faber |
| |
In the foothills of a mountain range in northern Pakistan is a beautiful orchard. Swallows wheel and dive silently over the branches, and the scent of jasmine threads through the air. Pomegranates hang heavy, their skins darkening to a deep crimson. Neglected now, the trees are beginning to grow wild, their fruit left to spoil on the branches. Many miles away, a frail young man is flung out of prison gates. Looking up, scanning the horizon for swallows in flight, he stumbles and collapses in the roadside dust. His ravaged body tells the story of fifteen years of brutality.
Reviews
The Independent on Sunday
Leyla Sanai
"Hobbs makes beautiful writing look simple; his sentences are clean, spare, unladen with excess baggage, and yet they shine like jewels."
15/01/2012
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The Daily Mail
Harry Ritchie
"Like the story itself, the style is simple and straightforward and packs a powerful punch. Beautifully crafted, tender and very, very moving."
06/01/2012
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The Sunday Times
Nick Rennison
"Hobbs strips his story to its essentials and, in doing so, creates a remarkably moving parable of the perennial conflict between love and power."
15/01/2012
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The Financial Times
Neel Mukherjee
"Convincingly rendered in the voice of a man who is learning to write late in life, the novel has a childlike simplicity and innocence about it. But its real power lies in the rift between the narratorial style, pared down to the point of seeming blanched in places, and the subject matter, often savage and excoriating."
27/01/2012
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The Independent
Boyd Tonkin
"As measured in its tread as the halting strolls of its frail narrator, Hobbs's novel mimics the rhythms of confinement, and convalescence, as it slows down time and perception. This leads to moments of bathos, but, much more often, Hobbs's gravely luminous prose delivers scenes of breath-catching beauty – or horror"
24/01/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Philip Womack
"Hobbs writes with clarity and purity, able to detail the horrors of his protagonist’s torture as convincingly as he can describe the beauty of a garden. "
20/02/2012
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The Literary Review
Frank Brinkley
"Throughout, the pared down language and attention to detail are captivating in their simplicity. Hobbs doesn’t need to show off."
01/03/2012
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The Guardian
Mirza Waheed
" There are passages of singular beauty. But the sense of unfinished stories lingers long after you have realised you are not going to hear anything more about Saba or the narrator's father. Perhaps it is in line with the narrative logic of the story of a boy who has spent 15 years in a filthy torture chamber that he, and we, cannot know anything more, but I somehow found that explanation inadequate, even as I immensely enjoyed this fine novel."
13/01/2012
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Times Literary Supplement
Edmund Gordon
"Wenmouth’s voice in The Short Day Dying is so compelling because Hobbs finds for it a register that reconciles its poetic elements with the background of the character himself. The narrative style of In the Orchard, the Swallows feels like a more self-conscious construct. Perhaps the relative complexity of the novel’s time frame and plot is a sign that Hobbs is growing in confidence – but some of his talent for ventriloquism, the central achievement of his first novel, has been sacrificed."
17/02/2012
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The Times
Kate Saunders
"The whole exercise left me rather cold — the would-be-exquisite prose is a blend of self-indulgence and self-pity, and my heart refused to bleed for characters apparently pieced together from more authentic novels."
18/02/2012
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