Wednesday, July 18, 2012

What I Was by Meg Rosoff

This book has left me puzzled. And confused about what is puzzling me. I know I read it too quickly to enjoy the good writing, but I wanted to know what was going to happen, and I had only so much lunch time. What I Was is the reminiscence of a 100-year-old man who lived an unexpected life when he was a 16-year-old schoolboy in 1962. (By my calculation, that means that he is telling this in the year 2048. This is not important to the story.) He has started at his third and most mediocre school just off the coast in East Anglia when he meets Finn, a boy his age who lives in a tiny, tidy hut on a bit of land that is accessible only at low tide or by boat.

Finn lives the life the schoolboy wants to live. Finn is the boy the schoolboy wants to be. The schoolboy, whose name is only revealed at the end, disdains, but fully participates in (if that isn't too active a term), the mediocrity of his life: the school, the other students, the life he's being led to. About the one student who follows him around despite all discouragement, he says, "His habitual wretchedness left me cold back then, as so much of human weakness did." In contrast to the dull grayness of his regular life, Finn is beauty and grace and strength. Finn catches his supper in the sea and cooks it over a fire that he has built. Finn climbs up cliffs and maneuvers small boats in a tossing ocean with ease.

Maybe part of what is puzzling me is that the schoolboy and Finn's story doesn't really end. I suppose the stories I've been reading lately have all had satisfying closure, so this story's lack of it has left me somewhat adrift. I still enjoyed the book, although I liked Rosoff's How I Live Now much better.