Book Review: The Museum Guard

In an effort to make way for my Christmas presents, which are almost entirely books, I have decided to go through my "to be read" pile and start picking off some that I haven't gotten to this past year. I started with The Museum Guard which tells the story of an uncle and nephew who work as security guards at a small museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The nephew, DeFoe, lost his parents in a zeppelin accident when he was eight and has since been raised by his uncle. DeFoe grew up living in a hotel with his uncle and when he finally moved out of his uncle's room, it was only to relocate down the hall in the same hotel. DeFoe's uncle, Russett, is a crotchety man in his forties who lives a fast life filled with women, alcohol and gambling. Trouble arises when DeFoe falls in love with an eccentric woman who is the caretaker at the local Jewish cemetery. When a new piece of artwork comes into the museum, DeFoe’s girlfriend becomes infatuated with it to the point of endangering her own life and sanity as well as that of the other characters in the novel.

This novel was a good read but it was very odd. The book seemed to start off with a very different story than the one that it ended up with. About halfway through the novel, the plot too an extremely unexpected turn that really changed the entire direction and theme of the novel. I greatly enjoyed the relationship between the nephew and his uncle but was not enthralled with the other characters. Furthermore, the events in the final 100 pages of the book seemed extremely far-fetched and completely out of context. Additionally, the last fifty pages are written as a series of letters which come off as being stilted. It feels as if the author wanted to the reader to have information that was outside of the narrator's purview and therefore decided to tell the final chapter through correspondence. Despite my knowledge that the book had peaked halfway through, I was still drawn to finish it.

-DLP