Review: Voyage To the End of the Room (Tibor Fischer)

Oceane is a computer graphics designer living comfortably in her London flat. She likes to travel as long as she doesn't have to leave her flat. For this she gets her travel agent to arrange for foreigners to visit her and thus give her the experience of having spent an evening in a foreign country.

Then one day she gets a letter from Walter, her ex-boyfriend who has been dead for ten years. Here the book moves back a few years into Oceane's past when she used to work for a sex club in Barcelona. The letter tells her that Walter knew something about a series of deaths that took place when she worked there. He instructs her to travel to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean to find the truth about the deaths. Reluctant to leave her flat, she hires Audley, a debt collector and sends him to investigate as she watches his progress using hi-tech gadgets and the internet.

The reason I picked up the book was the title. It promised to be a story that took a close look at the protagonist's life and that's what it did for the first few pages. After that it meandered along with flashback after flashback which did nothing to move the plot forward. I was kind of pleased with the book when I started reading it, started getting bored by the time I read the 50th page and was quite irritated when I reached the end of the book.

Although technically this book falls into the first person narrative category, with Oceane being the narrator, large part of the book involves someone narrating his/her story to Oceane or even sometimes narrating a story that someone else narrated to them in the first place. I found this style rather interesting at first but constantly stopping by to listen to people talk about their past really slows down the plot and makes the book boring.

Sure, the book is funny at times, but you need a halfway decent plot for a book to be called good, which this book doesn't have. The ending too was very disappointing. The book just ends, that's it. It's as if Fischer had enough of writing this novel and decided to stop. It's definitely not a book that I would recommend.

My Rating: 2/10