Harvard Yard by William Martin

Harvard Yard by William Martin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I am a transplant to Boston and at one of my first jobs in the area a co-worker recommended William Martin and his book Harvard Yard. The building we worked in was owned by Harvard and my co-worker loved it for how well it described the history and sense of place, as well as the immensity of the institution in the area. In that I was not disappointed. However the main storyline was quite lacking in my opinion.

As others who have reviewed this book have mentioned, the story is divided into two halves, a fictional historical narrative about a lost Shakespeare play winding its way through American history and Harvard’s history, and Peter Fallon and his search for the play, beset on all sides by others who want to get their hands on it first. If you sensed the sarcasm in the last part of that sentence, then you were correct and that was the feeling I had throughout the Pater Fallon portion of this book. With the constant shifting between the current timeline and the past, as well as the jumps through history from one Harvard generation to the next, the main story becomes disjointed, with only mild payoffs of understanding, usually being a snippet of a letter coming in the final page or paragraph of the chapter. Though there was some action in the Peter Fallon narrative, most of it was trumped by the history and the confrontations of the different past timelines in the story.

That does bring me to what I did like about the book. The amount of history that is in and around Harvard is undeniably impressive, and to see how the world has changed through the eyes of an institution is an impressive feat by Martin. With that I will say I think the excellent fictionalizations of the characters in Harvard’s rich history obliterated the reason why I was reading the book, especially since the Peter Fallon and the lost Shakespeare play narrative is never truly resolved for the reader. This is sad considering the 704 page investment you have with the story when it ends and the object the main character has been questing for the entire storyline is simply going to be found by Harvard at an appointed time, a time is not in the pages of the book. There was no reward to the main story so the whole book felt like a loss to me.

I was hoping this would be an engaging historical detective story and in some cases it was, but for the most part the actual storyline of the book was somewhat of a bore, which had no real resolution, and was lost in the history of Harvard.


View all my reviews

Thinking About Bringing it Back

It has been some time since my last post, which was for school.  However I think that since now I have graduated, and become somewhat employed, that I need to get back to the free form thoughts that blogging does allow.  So you can say I am thinking about bringing the blog back.  Here's to the experiment.

I am trying to keep up with reading and writing as consistently as I should be doing it, so I am forcing to start writing reviews for things I read, so there will be some more activity to come as I blog and do more everyday writing.

For those of you actually reading, thanks.