Review: Shane Jones’ ‘Light Boxes’

I’m going to start out this review by saying that, if I ever post a review here, it’s because I think the book in question is worthy of your dollars. There should be a rule that people only ever review books they enjoy: it would make the literature supplements of the weekend newspapers much easier to get through.

In short, you should probably just stop reading now and purchase Shane Jones’ Light Boxes. It’s a good book. It’s a very short book, which might put off those who equate length with quality (I feel as though there’s some kind of male compensatory thing going on there), but as soon as you get into it, you realise that the words need space to breathe. When you flick through and see that a bunch of pages carry only a single sentence, or one sentence repeated over and over, you begin to worry that it’s a kind of gimmick, or a way for Shane to hit the requisite 140 pages that constitute novel territory. Don’t be so cynical, folks! Shane knows what he’s doing.

I sometimes feel as though explaining what a book is about also kind of defeats the purpose of writing a review in the first place. People have been calling Light Boxes a ‘modern fable’, but that seems reductive. Somebody else referred to the experience of reading Light Boxes as ‘like reading a dream’, which seems a bit closer but still doesn’t quite get there. In any case, I’ll say this: if the cover of Light Boxes appeals to you, you’ll enjoy what’s inside.

As far as I can tell, nobody so far has concentrated on the cover of the new Penguin edition of Light Boxes. I have a suspicion that’s because ‘serious readers’ like to think of themselves as ‘cover blind’. There’s this idea that, because cover designs change between editions, to associate a cover with a work is wrong. But here’s the thing: in works which rely heavily on imagery and atmosphere, a cover can completely make or break a story. In this case, Penguin done good: illustrator Ken Garduno totally nails the feel of the story. In a way, I kind of wish Shane and Ken could team up again and turn the story into a fully-fledged picture book, in the spirit of Alice in Wonderland or Wind in the Willows, because I think they’re both on the same page, and if there’s any modern ‘adult’ book that could bear the weight of illustrations, it’s this one.

An easy, off-handed way to dismiss Light Boxes is to call it ‘childish’ or ‘overly whimsical’. We’re all afraid of regressing to the level of children. We want to feel as though we’re maturing, and one way we can show ourselves that we are maturing is to read increasingly complicated, Serious Works Of Literature. Light Boxes is a little quaint and a little magical, and I think that probably scares some people, because it collapses the boundaries between ‘kiddie lit’ and ‘adult lit’. Then again, it’s not like you have to read books like Light Boxes all the frigging time. If you can’t stomach a dose of whimsy once every so often, there’s a very real possibility that you’re so self-consciously ‘Adult’ you’ve forgotten how to have any fun.