I finally finished The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb the other day.  It is a big book and with the speed I read now I had worried that it would take me several months, like Crusaders did, but it turned out to be interesting enough to keep me hooked.  Here is what I thought:

I found this book easier to get into and read than I dared hope, and better than I expected.  As with most readers of this book, the first impression of it is the sheer size of the thing, with 720+  large-format pages it can be quite daunting to somebody who does not normally read quickly.

I should not have worried.  The book starts with the two boys who carried out the Columbine killings, setting the scene at four days before the shootings so immediately there is suspense as every time a character is introduced you wonder whether they will be affected by it.

The story continues, mixing fiction and reality from recent times and from American history as we follow the main characters’ attempts to escape the memories of Columbine and the narrator’s exploration of his family history.

Normally I would run a mile from a doorstop-sized book that chronicles multiple generations of a family, but this one drew me in making me as interested in the protagonist’s detective work concerning his ancestors as in his contemporary situation.

To provide variety in the long read the book follows a main story arc but mixes in flashbacks, newspaper stories, family letters and old diary entries.  There are even cameo appearances by Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla in some of the old letters.

The Hour I First Believed touches on some serious themes without forcing opinions down your throat, leaving the reader room to think more about those themes – like war and its effects (illustrated by the American Civil War and the Gulf War), mental health (especially post-traumatic stress disorder), chaos theory (very superficially), faith, family, crime and punishment, and society’s treatment of women.

One controversial aspect of the book is the decision to use real names of people associated with Columbine whether they are perpetrators, survivors or murder victims. The afterword to the book explains the reason for this and the author’s justification for it.  Even this gives rise to interesting questions about privacy.

I found the book rewarding and similar in scale and scope to Tom Wolfe.  It would make a good holiday read for anybody going on a *really* long holiday.

From a personal perspective I did have to allow myself a little inward smile when I reached page 550 and found the line:

“That’s what pisses me off the most,” I said. “The fact that she was just as big a liar as the rest of them.  Lies and secrets: that’s what the Quirks were all about.”

But way before that I was more than a little surprised when Nicola Tesla cropped up.  That is two books this year I have read where he is a character, along with Mark Twain.  Is this the current vogue in American literature – to get Tesla in there somehow?

The book hits the shops on November 11th and is currently a tenner at Amazon for the hardcover.  Given the size of the thing that’s good value for money, and as a bonus it provides food for thought on so many different topics.