Matt McAvoy Book Review

You’ve got to hand it to Javier de Lucia: when he decides to embark upon a book project, he doesn’t do it by half, publishing his character’s entire fictional memoir as two books, dividing one into a further three to give local context to its epic parts and writing an accompanying dissertation to delve into its elements, literary composition, metaphors, meanings and nuances.  I have been fortunate enough to review them all and to have read them in the order they are recommended (though I will hold back from Javier’s recommended reread of The Wake of Expectations in full, as suggested in this book).  It is a triumphant series, and this accompaniment adds profound and intricate levels of depth and meaning to every single aspect – and I do mean EVERY aspect.  Coming of Age, Coming to Terms is a complex study of the book’s subtleties, subtexts and symbolism.  I must admit, it made me view them in an entirely different light, as well as the long-form narrative, and I can absolutely see why Javier felt the need to compile this companion.  His books – especially those set earlier in the life of Calvin McShane – can be and often are misunderstood.  This is a means of the author making sense to himself and anyone who chooses to indulge his appraisal and dissection of his own work.  It seems there is something particularly cathartic about the exercise to him.

My personal view is that the accompaniment is an incredible piece of work in itself – in some ways as intriguing and compelling to me as the fictional saga itself, though of course that is a matter of personal taste, and the admiration probably a reflection of professional respect.  I do recommend this book if you enjoyed the series, though I will say it is very long, and Javier clearly has an extremely profound analytical interest in his books.  It’s almost as if he is himself making sense of every tiny detail, every fine grain; you may consider that he is searching for palimpsest where there might really be none to be found, adding implication where you might see only entertaining fiction.  Javier will relish this, I am certain; he is an author who wants you to challenge, to question, to infer or deny hidden meaning and metaphor in his work.  Be prepared that he really draws you into the book at an atomic level.  From my point of view, I believe it achieves its objective superbly, by making me reconsider every moment in the series.  Much of what he shares here hadn’t even crossed my mind at the time of reading it, and he is absolutely right to believe that this companion publication will compel the reader into a complete rethink of the very minutiae of the saga.

The author makes no secret of the fact that he used artificial intelligence to create some of the articles in the book, though there is no doubt that his signature is al over every one of them, whether in an editing or rewriting capacity, or just the sheer quality of the prompts he wrote to instruct ChatGPT in the first place – which, knowing Javier, I’m sure he would have agonized over at length, ensuring the optimization of every word.  Many purists will surely condemn the project for this, but it is a worthy experiment, and one which has surely brought a better critical writer in Javier himself, for I believe there is much more in this book that is his than AI’s.  The fact that it is woven together so seamlessly, the separation indeed very difficult to discern, is testament to both the vastly improved quality of AI and of Javier’s tremendous skill as a writer – a craftsman, no less.