Book Review: The Sanctuary by Andrew Hunter Murray

 

Ben Parr makes his living by painting portraits of wealthy families living in Villages, designed and constructed by the billionaire businessman John Pemberley. Ben is content with his life in the city. But his ambitious fiancee, Cara, works for Pemberley on one of his secret projects on an island called Sanctuary Rock. When she stops communicating, Ben decides to travel to the island. After an arduous journey, he gets there but realises Cara is no longer working there. He begins to adore Pemberley and likes the life inside the experimental settlement. But soon he realises that there are dangerous secrets connected with Pemberley, and all is not as well as it seems.

The Sanctuary is a dystopian mystery novel written by Andrew Hunter Murray, who is already a best-selling writer and who also writes for the BBC. The novel tries to explore the themes of environmental degradation caused by humans and the manipulation of the public by businesses. I received a review copy of the novel from its publisher, Blackstone Publishing, through Netgalley in exchange for honest feedback. Unfortunately, my honest feedback is that the book is a colossal bore, and the only reason I read this through is to witness the spectacle of this junk's final crash landing.

The readers who regularly follow my book reviews (who can be counted on fingers; incidentally, good news to the publisher and the author of the book) may be aware that it is very rare that I dislike a book so vehemently. But I realise that when I opt for advance review copies of unpublished books, there is bound to be an end to my streak of reading good books. It's inevitable that I end up with a stinker at some point in time. So I am not complaining. The going was pretty solid while it lasted.

The Sanctuary is an exhibition hall of cliches that inhabits thriller and mystery novels. It follows every beat and every turn that better novels have already established, albeit in an unimaginative manner. The use of tried-and-tested plot devices only tires out the already redundant story line. The twists are visible from miles ahead. Being a novel set in the future, it miserably fails in world-building too. The mainland never looks too terrible, and the Sanctuary never feels as enticing as described in the novel. Even the social issues it tries to address failed to connect with me.

The character development in this novel is a joke. The protagonist doesn't show any defining traits and seems to just flow the way the story flows. The antagonist is supposed to be an imposing figure. The reader realises this only when the author uses the word imposing to describe him a few times in the story. His plans for the world are also supposed to be revolutionary, but they are never convincingly explained. The other characters are all one-note characters and never get a chance to show off their personalities. Cara, the fiancee of Ben, is an invisible presence throughout the plot but gets relegated to just an adjective for him most of the time. There is a portion where Ben converses with her in his imagination. That part wasn't any good, but considering his interactions with other characters, it was kind of tolerable.

The conversations between John and Ben were, to some extent, readable and had a chance to take the story to some interesting levels. The writer never followed up on the sparks, and that possibility was also missed. The climatic showdown was pathetic, to say the least, and never created any impact. Overall, The Sanctuary failed to impress me. It isn't well written, it doesn't build an interesting universe, its characters don't possess individuality, their motives aren't convincing, and it fails to build any suspense or tension that could captivate me.