Author picture

Cormac James

Author of The Surfacing

4 Works 77 Members 26 Reviews

Works by Cormac James

The Surfacing (2014) 54 copies
Trondheim (2024) 13 copies
Dwars door het ijs (2016) 8 copies
Track & Field: A Novel (2000) 2 copies

Tagged

Common Knowledge

Birthdate
1971
Gender
male
Birthplace
Cork, County Cork, Ireland
Places of residence
Montpellier, France

Members

Reviews

This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
A common literary trope is marital bliss. What’s much more interesting, however, is to put a long-standing couple into a challenging situation and then watch how they respond. Albee did this to horrifying effect in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?” It turned out that George and Martha had some pretty upsetting problems underlying their “happy” marriage. James’ approach to this experiment is much more subtle, however. He gives us Alba, a conventional introvert, and Lil, an unsentimental extrovert. They have a long-term lesbian marriage with three seemingly well-adjusted children living in rural France. James exposes their troubled relationship in the most brutal fashion imaginable. Their oldest son, Pierre, suffers a cardiac arrest while away at school in Trondheim, Norway. Despite being revived by a passing bus driver, Pierre is now in a coma induced by a combination of brain trauma and medical intervention. Will he survive? Will he have permanent brain damage? Will the doctors be able to safely bring him out of the coma? No one knows. And that’s the challenge James presents to Alba and Lil.

James ratchets up his protagonists’ feelings of fear, dread, and hopelessness by putting them in the most claustrophobic setting imaginable—an ICU in Trondheim, Norway in mid-winter. Although James does not belabor the point, Trondheim is isolated only a few hundred miles from the Artic Circle and experiences almost total darkness at that time of year. Alba and Lil quickly display petty feelings of resentment characterized by Alba’s mystical religious fervor and rejection of Lil’s more pragmatic approach to life, including heavy drinking and romantic entanglements. Lil, on the other hand, doesn’t have the patience Alba seems to require.

James explores multiple themes in his narrative including the effects crises have on family dynamics, the roles that faith and miracles play in storytelling, and the limits of hope and forgiveness. Yet his overarching theme seems to be the disparity between surface appearances and underlying reality. Clearly, things aren’t always what they seem. What appears to be a successful marriage is really deeply troubled. From the hospital, the women notice an adjacent building site where the construction is hidden behind a print of a finished building. Christmas lights decorate the town where a young man is isolated from his surroundings. Lil encounters a runaway who she sees as needing her help, but the young woman is skeptical of her motives and ultimately rejects her help. The characters assemble on the roof of the hospital to observe Pierre’s doctor practice shooting at live targets—or maybe not. James also suggests that Pierre may have fled to Trondheim for school to escape a deeply dysfunctional family.

This is a meditative novel filled with close observations of characters in isolation and experiencing psychological pain. Notwithstanding its dark themes, the narrative is satisfying, often lyrical, and deeply moving.
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ozzer | 1 other review | Feb 28, 2024 |
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
This is a family story centered around a married lesbian couple whose 20-year-old son is in a coma in a Norwegian hospital, thousands of miles away from their home in France. These two mothers, Lil and Alba, already have a strained relationship, and they have a harrowing journey and days of waiting and watching the medical team care for their son. There is a truly extreme atmosphere of love and anxiety and hope and fear mixed together in this story. I found the hospital scenes very moving, and it was never clear until the end of the book if their son would awaken from the coma or if their marriage would survive. A well-written novel.… (more)
 
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KatyBee | 1 other review | Feb 22, 2024 |
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
In the years after the loss of the Franklin Expedition many ships were dispatched to the Arctic, first to look for the survivors of Franklin’s crew, then to look for evidence of what had happened to them. “The Surfacing” is the story of one of the ships searching in the Arctic. As the crew prepared for their northern adventure, they spent time getting supplies in Disko and Morgan, one of the officers, had a brief affair with a woman, Miss Rink, the sister of the governor. When the expedition heads north Morgan discovers Miss Rink is a stowaway. It is too late to turn back. The ship heads into the far north where it becomes stuck fast in the ice.

The story was about the isolated crew and their struggles to survive and to get back to civilization. The words revealed a background of unrelenting cold and treacherous ice. The narrative was ultimately about isolation and what it means to be a father – as the results of Miss Rink’s fecund condition became more and more obvious after she was discovered on board.
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Familyhistorian | 23 other reviews | Feb 13, 2022 |
When I started reading this book, it frankly didn't interest me that much, but the more I read, the more I found I could not put the book down. I knew very little about the ships lost during the search for the Northwest Passage, and James inspired me to do some research to learn more. I can imagine through the writing how quiet it must have been, except for the cracking and shifting of the ice. I was only displeased with the ending. Maybe I missed some hint, but the book just seemed to end.
 
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hobbitprincess | 23 other reviews | Apr 19, 2019 |

Statistics

Works
4
Members
77
Popularity
#231,246
Rating
½ 3.6
Reviews
26
ISBNs
23
Languages
1

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