The Marble Collector (by Cecelia Ahern)

(Amazon UK link)

On the whole I have liked the books I’ve read by Cecelia Ahern. They often have unusual themes, some of them quite quirky, bordering on fantasy. I had not come across her novel ‘The Marble Collector’, so when I spotted it at a church book sale, it wasn’t a difficult decision to spend fifty cents to acquire it.

It’s a tad complicated in structure, with two different first person narrators. It took me a few chapters to realise that those narrated by the elderly Fergus Boggs are all headed ‘Playing with Marbles’, while those by his daughter Sabrina are headed ‘Pool Rules’. Indeed it’s not immediately obvious what their relationship is, but it is quickly made clear.

Sabrina works at a swimming pool for the elderly as a lifeguard, although she rarely has to do anything much. She’s married to Aidan and they have three sons; they have evidently been having some marriage problems, but she isn’t entirely sure why he keeps hassling her, asking what’s wrong, or if she’s happy, when she really doesn’t know herself. Aidan has taken their sons away on a camping trip, including some time to observe a solar eclipse.

An incident at the pool causes Sabrina to lose her temper for a moment, although she quickly regrets it. And it’s agreed that she should take the rest of the day off. She isn’t entirely sure what to do, when she gets a phone call from Lea, a nurse at the rehabilitation centre where her father is staying after a debilitating stroke. Lea has just taken delivery of some boxes of his stuff, sent by his ex-wife, and she wants Sabrina to check them first rather than potentially upsetting her father with things he can’t remember.

Three of the boxes contain a staggering number of marbles, carefully catalogued, although a few seem to be missing. Sabrina’s mother knows nothing about them. So she decides to try and figure out why on earth her father has these marbles, and what has happened to the missing ones.

Meanwhile, her father’s story is told non-chronologically, starting from when he was a small child in a strict school where the priest beats him and shuts him in a cupboard. Over the course of the book we learn a lot about his childhood and his relationship to his five brothers. We also discover that he played and collected marbles from quite a young age - and, eventually, why neither his wife nor his daughter knew anything about them.

The writing is clever, gradually revealing more about Fergus’s life, so in my mind I was piecing it together as Sabrina sets out to visit a lot of different people. Gradually the story unfolds in her mind, as she meets more and more people. I found the timeline a tad unrealistic - she fits a huge amount of driving and talking in the course of just one day. And there’s a bizarre anachronism (if that’s the correct word) in that there’s a full moon on the evening of a solar eclipse, which should be impossible.

However, I can accept both these as part of the often unusual worlds that the author creates. I had more problem with the amount of detail that went into describing the various marbles and related games - a topic that didn’t interest me in the slightest - and I was also quite disturbed by the amount of ‘strong’ language, much of which I thought gratuitous.

And while I kept reading, and it did become more interesting towards the end, I found the story dragged somewhat in the middle. It could have been rather shorter - or, better still, more condensed in the middle with rather more at the end. We see a bit of hope for the future in the final pages, as Sabrina has learned all about her father’s obsession, and he has started remembering some of the things he had forgotten. But it’s not really conclusive, and I’d have liked to see them meeting again, and to know whether or not Sabrina’s marriage was going to survive.

So I guess the people got under my skin towards the end, which is a sign of good characterisation. But I didn't find it 'beautiful' as the front suggests, nor emotional or touching, as the blurb on the back implies. I doubt if I’ll read 'The Marble Collector' again. Others of this author’s books are more interesting, and the amount of bad language in this one means I probably won’t be lending it out much.

But don't necessarily take my word for it. Many readers absolutely love this book. 

Review copyright 2021 Sue's Book Reviews