Like the member who wrote the first review here I had mixed feelings about the book. As I was reading The Parts I more than once thought about abandoning it but when I finished it I sat still mulling it over for a long time and that's one sign of a very good book.

It was because of its length that I considered giving up; I'm more one for the suggestive & oblique than for investigation of characters' thoughts and daily lives. Ridgway never goes into excessive detail, is never boring, but a structure that however faintly is reminiscent of Victorian novels isn't quite to my taste. Yet whenever I began to think about those short cryptic French novels crying out to be read instead, I'd happen on yet another passage that made me laugh aloud. I knew from having read Animals that Ridgway is a marvellous mimic with an enviable sense of humour and you'd know it from reading this as well.

A few of the scenes were so deeply impressive that I feel sure I'll remember them for years. One is simply a page or two telling of a crime one of the characters witnesses through a car window on a rainy night in a sleeping village in which Ridgway conveys not only the sense of mystery you feel passing through unfamiliar places in the small hours, but the terror and hope and dashing of hope of that terrified victim. Another describes the passage across a carpet by an injured person on all fours: the carpet seems a whole land, one in which tribes worship, celebrate, battle, arise and disappear during the course of that slow crawl--I can't remember having read anything else that describes so well the struggle to perform the everyday when one is debilitated. I so admire Ridgway's ability to make scenes like these striking and real..

One huge gripe, though, and it's nothing to do with Ridgway: The cover of my (Faber & Faber paperback) edition is horrid.The kindest thing I can say of it is that it might pass muster as the cover of a novel for particularly backward young adults.

eta: It's a few years now since I wrote that and those two scenes do indeed still come to mind now & again.