Beach Music by Pat Conroy

Synopsis :

A Southerner living abroad, Jack McCall is scarred by tragedy and betrayal. His desperate desire to find peace after his wife’s suicide draws him into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family’s past that can heal his anguished heart. 

Spanning three generations and two continents, from the contemporary ruins of the American South to the ancient ruins of Rome, from the unutterable horrors of the Holocaust to the lingering trauma of Vietnam, Beach Music sings with life’s pain and glory. 

It is a novel of lyric intensity and searing truth, another masterpiece among Pat Conroy’s legendary and beloved novels. 



This is what I say :

If you read my post here, I must update that I didn't bring this book with me for that particular trip.  It's just too heavy and bulky.  At the last minute, I chosen a lighter paperback.

Having said that, I have finished reading this title and it was a pretty good read. To think that this copy sat not on my shelf but on a coffee table together with a few other titles for a few years as I used them as decorative items.  The reason it had that 'role' was because I thought it would be a boring read! How wrong can I be! hahah...

Beach Music certainly wasn't boring.  Told from the perspective of Jack McCall who couldn't deal with his wife's suicide, he exiled himself and his young daughter to Europe and doesn't want anything to do with his friends and family back home.

Until he was called home and from there he learned the stories of generation past that might help him deal with all that he has to deal with.

Now, the title, why Beach Music?  There's some reviewer who commented that it's the 'shag dance music' that they used to dance to in their youth.  However, personally, I felt that it's the music that calls one home...it calls Jack home, back to the beach and the house that falls into the sea where it all started.   It's also the natural music that calls the loggerhead back to the sea once they are hatched and loggerhead conservation that features quite extensively throughout the book. 

I guess if you read in between the lines, you can actually see the similarities of these creatures in the lives of the characters.

The writing is quite beautiful and there's a few quotable quotes that again, if you look deeper, can be found throughout the book.

My only qualm would be that character developing is rather poor especially with some of the minor characters that was mentioned once and then never heard of again...like Martha.  And also probably that the author packed too many sub-story line into this title that it got slightly overcrowded.

But still, it's a thumbs up :)