The White Room, Craig Higginson, Pan Macmillan, ISBN: 9781770106123
HIGGINSON is a South African playwright and novelist. He has been nominated for and won numerous awards locally and internationally and his latest publication, The White Room (his fourth novel), has been met with praise and singing adoration from across the country.
Hannah Meade has just arrived in London for the opening night of her play. There she has arranged to meet with Pierre, an old beau and lover. So far so good. Then we start throwing in some complications. Pierre was a previous student of Hannah’s in Paris (ooh la la) and it was a tumultuous and intense affair a number of years back.
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We, as the reader, get to experience the past affair as well as the present day events as they unfold (lucky us). To make it all the more dramatic, Pierre is married, Hannah has been through a number of awful events in her life and to top it all off, there is quite literally no direct speech in this novel.
I feel as if I am supposed to wax lyrical on this inspirational and “fresh” layout. Written as prose and set out as a play – minus a script – we experience POV’s of both Hannah and Pierre. There’s some fiction thrown into the real life event roll outs. It made me uncomfortable. The choppy writing and the horrific breakdown of Hannah’s bladder infections wasn’t for me.
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