Rating: 
Summary: "The Fall" Explores The Gamut Of Human Emotions - Superb!!
Review: This is a powerhouse of a novel that will have you reading compulsively until you've turned the last page, and will leave you deep in thought long after that. "The Fall" has achieved a place on my Top 10 list of favorite works of fiction.Rob Dewer hears on the car radio that his old friend and mountain climbing partner, Jamie Matthewson, has fallen to his death while making an almost suicidal solo climb. Although the two men have not been in touch for years, the news hits Dewer hard, stirring up a series of memories and strong, unresolved feelings from long ago. He immediately turns his car towards Wales and begins a journey, not only to bring comfort to Matthewson's widow, his old friend and former lover, Ruth, but into the past where decades old secrets and betrayals are disclosed. Author Simon Mawer writes, "At some time or other you must confront your past. We are our past...There is nothing else, and none of it can be undone." Mawer visits the past of a group of people who are intimately connected through friendship, love, lust, jealousy, competition, hatred and blood ties. The enormous power of some of Mawer's characters is almost overwhelming at times, as is their extreme fragility and vulnerability. His prose is masterful and poignant. The plot is riveting, compelling, almost brutal, in its honesty. I have never been very interested in the sport of climbing, but Mawer's narrative transported me, time and time again, on exhilarating treks up mountainsides; the action so vividly described that I felt that I was one of the climbers. His descriptions of landscapes, both fierce and bucolic, are as visual as paintings. Mawer is indeed a master craftsman. This is a novel of love, of moral choices and decisions that life forces us to make. Sometimes the repercussions of these decisions echo into the future, for generations to come. This is truly one of the most amazingly original novels I have read in years and it has effected me deeply. I cannot praise "The Fall" highly enough!
JANA
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