Paper

On the face of it, Paper should have been an ideal read for me - literary historical fiction written in a delicately poetic Iranian style, details of antique paper-making threaded through the narrative, and the importance of books and reading taking centre stage. Unfortunately, I really found it difficult to get into this novel and frequently found myself setting it aside. Dare I say that I got just a little bored? I did like the character of the anonymous Scribe who found himself scratching around for work in a provincial backwater, in an age where printing presses were beginning to take work from manual copyists. A highly trained artist of writing, he finds himself reduced to writing out will codicils on, to his mind at least, depressingly substandard straw paper! Around the Scribe moves a cast of townspeople, some of who are endearing and interesting. There is also a political narrative which winds around a Prisoner in a castle and the Warden charged with keeping him there and it was this thread that I failed to understand. I had no idea who this Prisoner was or his connection to the Scribe so that whole concept mostly left me baffled. It's a shame, because I really wanted to like Paper and, overall, it has lots of good points, but that one significant aspect went totally over my head.