A monster story with something of a pity the monster touch, The String Diaries is set in several centuries with a deft weaving between eras as Stephen Lloyd Jones picks up and then drops one thread after another. The reader is diverted by the time shifts, it’s like channel hopping. Lloyd Jones tells you just enough about each narrative line to satisfy and then skips to the next time frame and a mostly new set of characters. The borderline on some characters’ lives can intersect with the adjoining timeline. And there’s a continuous thread throughout since monsters can be long lived.
Some of the action takes place in the Welsh countryside and that was my favorite aspect of the book. Jones must know this country well and I believe I got a fine sense of what it would be like to live in an old cottage in Gwynedd by the mountain of Cadair Idris. This is country where the rocks speak their names.
It’s common in melodrama for strangers to be thrown together who have little choice but to trust each other. I was reminded of the early English Hitchcock…all of Hitchcock is shot through with the risks and rewards of encountering strangers. And Jones adds an extra gothic level by the need to “validate” people already well known to us.
I was fascinated when Hannah, that wonderful defender of her family, was warned to “validate” her husband. In the fictional world of Stephen Lloyd Jones, an encounter with a smiling stranger can be lethal, in part because they might not be a stranger. The husband you slept with might not be your husband.
Add to these psych-yourself-out puzzles the antique romance of the sovereign of a long dead empire, the Emperor Franz Josef, issuing a secret and perhaps futile proclamation to destroy all monsters…creatures with whom his empire had previously lived in an uneasy alliance. It’s wonderful being a novelist if that means that you get to describe monster parties in old Budapest, another prime location shot in this movie…excuse me…novel.
