Review: Contrast

Linda Coussement, Contrast (Elephas Publishing 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199799331-contrast?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ZtMH0DeWED&rank=4

Ghost wakes up to a beautiful morning and looks around for someone with whom to converse. Rabbit, Cat and Frog are discussing some mysterious new object in the garden, a round, flat circle of concrete. Leora walks out, speaking to her friend Dana on the phone, and notices the object, too.
Her neighbour Xander notices that a strange circular patch of flowers has replaced his prized Japanese maple. The concrete and flower circles have a psychological effect on their viewers. There is something malevolent about the wall between the gardens.
Ghost—named during life Adam—goes back through his life in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation to figure out where he went wrong. Ghost and Leora discuss the meaning of life. Xander believes it’s all about ‘staying away from the heavy’.
Ghost’s memories of life have a hazy, dream-like quality. Nothing seems solid and real, provoking the reader to think deeply about the same existential questions. Perhaps the two gardens symbolise purgatory, where Leora and Xander, also, are stuck because they’re dead inside, and the wall represents their barriers to self-actualisation.
We get no sense of a Creator god. The dead and the living bump around, coming to some conclusions, but nothing earth-shattering.
We spend a few too many early chapters wondering at the strangeness of the world, and by the half-way mark, we still haven’t figured it out. As the reader is also trying to work it out, this leaves an uncomfortable feeling. While Ghost and Leora and Xander work out the rules to this world where ghosts can manifest and walls can be malevolent and circles of concrete and flowers can appear overnight and you can converse with disembodied voices, there could have been some impending consequence, some ticking timebomb necessitating that they solve the puzzle quickly. Or, there could have been a bit more action or relationship conflict to make it more interesting.
A world where already-dead ghosts help the still-living humans work out the answers to ‘life, the universe and everything’ is an interesting one. I liked how it was mostly Ghost asking the questions, not the living. Unsurprisingly (as they are bogus), mediums who purport to translate across the boundary have never been able to procure for us solid answers.