Caroline's Bikini

As a personal enjoyment rating, Caroline's Bikini falls somewhere between 1-star and 2-stars, because it's actually 267 pages of waffle around Evan Gordonston's unrequited love for Caroline Beresford, the married woman he's renting rooms from (actually, a whole upper floor). The main text of the 'novel' (text? experiment? essay?) revolves around Evan telling his best friend, Emily Stuart, how in love he is with Caroline, but also how he doesn't ever do anything to pursue that love other than sit around and drink coffee with her (she's married, the time isn't right) and then rhapsodise to Emily about how wonderful she is. It's evident in the text that Emily is half in love with her best friend (though obviously, she can't admit it to him, they're best friends!), and whilst he does say he loves her once or twice (I don't recall exactly, because a lot of the stuff is repeated over the text, so the same scenario may appear multiple times) he obviously isn't serious about it, because he's in love with this Caroline person, which is the only reason why he's meeting Emily--because she's his confidante, and because they're writing a novel about this great love of his. Which doesn't go anywhere. Throughout the whole story. And then it ends with this very strange scenario. (Evan, you did what?!) Actually, scrap the unrequited love bit. This is a story of a man descending into depression and madness because he thinks he's in love with someone. --- But I rated it with three stars, so that requires a justification. In terms of prose, the writing is lovely. Despite a tendency towards overly long sentences full of commas and an inability to take a breath (I find myself writing in this same style: see extremely long sentence above), Caroline's Bikini is full of tenderness and longing, sensual and grounded... and is actually a very clever piece of metatextual work. Scattered throughout the main text of the 'novel' are various footnotes, few of which give extra information, most of which refer to sections in the "Some Further Materials" section. Initially, I thought these footnotes were useless--to see wonderfully done footnotes, pick up any Ankh-Morpork novel by Terry Pratchett--but then I got to the said Further Materials section and realised... Caroline's Bikini is something of a literary criticism of a piece of text (it doesn't feel novel-like enough for me to call it a novel) written in the stream-of-consciousness style about a writer who is writing about writing a novel. Kirsty Gunn says it herself in the Alternative Narratives often footnoted: Caroline's Bikini, the work of a Stuart about Gordonston, arranged by a Gunn...was never to be a prose work belonging to anything other than the Scottish and modernist project, with roots in the early Renaissance tradition of Petrarchan love poetry by way of a long-standing debt to writing by Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. To put it succinctly, this meta piece of writing is so meta. And as I am not a lit student (I study creative writing, and my undergrad is in accounting, as I find myself saying so often as introduction nowadays), I shall give up on understanding the references and close this review. Three stars because I really don't know how to define how much I was bored by the story, but also how much I was awed by the meta-ness of it, though I am really too lazy to analyse it any further.

I thoroughly enjoyed all the meta-textual fun, especially the critical apparatus on the story or Emily's re-construction of Evan's story of obsessive love which she is formulating as a novel. More than anything though, and for all that I relished the literary games, the novel is really very readable and, very often, laugh-out-loud-funny. Incidentally, I seem to have drunk in nearly all the pubs where the two talk & drink!

Wish I had read the reviews first.

this book is a peculiar book. Repetitive and academic. Wouldn't recommend it to our book club and found it tedious to read. However the reviews in the FT and Guardian loved it.

This is a story about writing a story. It's a story about love, largely unrequited. It's a story about friendship, about things unsaid, about the ordinariness of life, about everything and about nothing. It's fun, it's compelling, it's inspiring and it's got me reading 16th century poetry.