The Diary of Nicholas Oldman is a fanciful flight into the
prehistoric past. It is 272 pages that explore the question: “how would modern
man survive alongside dinosaurs?”
About MG Atkinson
MG
Atkinson has an eighteen-year-old daughter who, he says, is going on thirty. He
is currently employed as a Steward for a cancer care hospice, but writing has
recently become a passion and he published his first book, The Diary of Nicholas Oldman, on Kindle in August 2014. His
favourite book of all time is Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings. He says that he has lost count of the number of times he
has read it.
About the Diary of
Nicholas Oldman
MG Atkinson has a flair for description and wordiness. He
takes ten words where I would use one. This is not a bad thing, in fact I envy
authors who can do this. I sit in front of my screen for hours on end, willing
my short paragraphs to turn into entire chapters, but it seems I simply don’t
write this way.
Atkinson, however, does it well and does it consistently.
272 pages of descriptive language, and I can feel the hot sun of the desert on
my parched lips, I can feel the danger lurking just beyond my eyesight in the
jungle, and I can feel the buoyancy of the raft beneath me. I take my hat off
to him for this. His descriptive scenes were mesmerising and beautiful, clad in
elegant language which encouraged me to keep reading.
However, I do have some caution to give. The shape of the
book was non-existent. Nothing happened.
Or rather, everything
happened.
Constantly and without rest, the reader is bombarded with
adventure after adventure, the book becoming a series of anecdotes about survival
in a prehistoric landscape burgeoning with danger. And I suppose that is
exactly what a diary is. A compilation of anecdotes which come together to give
a picture of an individual’s ongoing daily struggles. However, there is a
reason why we don’t publish our teenage diaries. Diaries lack shape, are often
disjointed, and are thoroughly egocentric. All of which this book is.
I have no solution to the egocentricity. Nicholas Oldman is,
quite simply, the only human on the planet. Therefore the book will be centred
on himself, as there is no-one else to write about. However, the repetition of
the first pronoun begins to give the book a vaguely indulgent air.
I struggled to get a grasp on his character, which seems an
odd thing to say after complaining that “it’s all about Nicholas”. However, I
wonder if much of our perception of characters comes through the eyes of
others, and through their interaction with other characters, and this of course
is lacking here. There is no opportunity here to see Nicholas through anyone
else’s eyes. Perhaps the addition of some stories from his life “before” would
help here.
The book trudged on, and I trudged with Nicholas, him in
search of somewhere to live, me in search of some purpose to the whole thing.
The same level of alertness and emotional investment was kept throughout, and
then suddenly, at the end, an epilogue. There is someone else in the book; there is another storyline! I loved this part, but wondered if bringing
it in and out throughout the 272 pages would have added more intrigue. An extra
thread to weave into Nicholas’ trudging. The finding of the bones, the
classifying, the inspection, the missing of their importance, then, finally, on
the day of his birth, the revelation.
I love this description around page 200 when Nicholas
discovers his raft, which he had thought to have lost, and is so desperate to
get to it.
“I remember pacing the
bank up and down like a trammelled wild thing, looking out over the river and
at my raft some hundred-odd metes away. My eyes never left the raft, even as I
turned to pace back the other way, my body swivelled beneath my head and my
eyes stayed firmly fixed on my target. Its outline was sparkling with that
hunters gleam that only my frenzied eye could see.”
It becomes clear to the reader that Nicholas is going mad,
the days of isolation and his sole focus on survival at all cost taking their
toll. However, the beautiful description which unfolds to us is then kinda
blown away a few paragraphs later by him telling us that he had gone mad.
Summarising in case we had missed it. The spelling out of such a situation
dulls its effect for me, and as I reader I personally prefer not to be
spoon-fed.
This book is a fantastic debut. Atkinson had an idea, and
saw it through. It was a mammoth task, and I cannot imagine the hours of work
in penning and honing that has gone into it. It is near perfect in terms of
grammar and style, and I know that there will be many fans of descriptive work
who will adore this book, and be relieved when they find that there will be
more.
You can find out more about MG Atkinson on his webpage here.
You can download The Diary of Nicholas Oldman here.
You can read about it on Goodreads here.
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