Scarred – Monica Dickens

The Monica Dickens reading marathon continued with something a bit different next. Scarred wasn't published until 1991, not long before her death in 1992. All the Monica Dickens books I have read previously were written and set in a much older age. A time when everything had a certain, often wartime, quaintness about it.

Scarred has none of that though and as a result seems to be lacking a certain cosiness. Don't get me wrong, if you were reading this book without any previous expectations about Monica Dickens books then I'm sure you would enjoy it – it's well written with some interesting characters and some thought-provoking issues – but with that previous experience it did just lack a certain something that it was very hard to put my finger on.   

Going back to the book – the main character Mark is a man who is unsuccessful in much of what he does, but instead of realising that this is due to a certain amount of laziness on his part, he is convinced that it is due to a scar on his face that was caused during a teenage car accident. After seeing a newspaper article about a successful plastic surgeon who has worked miracles on some of his patients Mark becomes fixated on the idea that this man can solve all his problems. Life is never that straightforward though…