”Everyone’s story is important, she assured them”

/ _ |

Lean, Fall, Stand is a story about storytelling and about communication.

I want to start by saying that, in my view, the book blurb communicates rather too much and does a bit too much storytelling of its own. I would advise not reading it before reading the book itself, if you can possibly avoid it. If you read the blurb, all the tension disappears from the first part of the book. In truth this doesn’t really matter because that tension is a very minor part of the book, but the fact is you don’t know that whilst reading the book and it did taint the book a bit for me.

I had to pause about two-thirds through the book and gather my thoughts. And it was at this point that I realised the way the blurb had spoiled the tension of the first part didn’t really matter because the first part was about something other than a tense story. The reason I had to pause was that I started to feel that I was almost reading three separate, but related, books. That was in the early pages of the third part (the parts are call Lean, /, Fall, _, and Stand, |), and it is that part the gives the key to the book and its themes of storytelling and communication.

Part one (Lean, /) tells the story of an Antarctic expedition that goes wrong. You maybe don’t notice it at the time, but it is full of miscommunications, white noise, broken lines of communication and the unraveling of one person’s ability to communicate at all.

Speech therapy and alternative means of communication play an important role in part two (Fall, _). Again, there are multiple references to different forms of communication, often this time focusing on how difficult it can be to understand when you are on the receiving end (technical/medical talk, for example) or how much we are bombarded by communication in our lives (one character’s love of the silence in Society of Friends’ meetings is telling).

And the speech therapy theme develops in part three (Stand, |) which celebrates alternative forms of communication and ways to tell stories.

There’s a lot, lot more in the book about storytelling and about people’s struggles to communicate.

So, perhaps it is very deliberate on the part of the author and publisher to dissipate the tension of the story in part one so that other themes rise to the surface. Perhaps I am being unfair in criticising the blurb.

I can very much see this book as a movie. It has the drama at the start, the emotion and struggle in the middle and the perfect cinematic ending.