Present: Alex, Jane, Jen, Carl, Nathalie and Nic
The Berry Bar served a lovely Earl Grey Martini in an iced tea pot with a glass cup and saucer. It did less well with the Ginger Fizz but you can't have everything: a truth confirmed when we reached the Brasserie, which was soulless and slow with only a very vague understanding of what constituted a rare rib eye, a pie, or customer service. That did not stand in the way, however, of an excellent evening. We've noted before that books that open with six pages of quotations from glowing reviews rarely are as entertaining as those reviewers suggest and this was no exception. Whilst the general consensus was that the book opened strongly - quite where the decline set in wasn't entirely clear - by half way through, most of us were, although reasonably entertained while reading, reluctant to pick up the book in the first place. Firstly, as Jen noted, the characters were unpleasant and unsympathetic so it was hard to be interested in what happened to them. The characters were caricatured Nazi sympathisers and, whilst the book referenced real-life events, such as the black shirts marching in the East End, and real-life people, such as Mosley, it did so without giving the reader any sense of learning (unlike, for example, Sarah Waters "Little Stranger" which was highly engaging and entertaining whilst still providing historical insight). Secondly, as Nathalie illustrated with tagged examples, the female characters were weakly sketched, negatively portrayed nonentities serving little useful purpose in the narrative. We agreed that Seth's sister existed only to humanise him, his love for her preventing him from being entirely a monster. However, the other female characters need not have been there at all: their "parts" could have been played by male characters just as easily. Jane felt the book was a disparate set of ideas and two distinct stories, dragged kicking and screaming together into one novel by a first time novelist who may not have a second book in him (though we said that about Jed Rubenstein after "Interpretation of Murder" and he's only gone and published another (darn it!) so what do we know?!). Arguably, the plot was contrived (but then isn't that the purpose of "plotting") and the characters manipulated to fit - once Jane proposed the sentiment, we quickly agreed that the main protagonist's rare condition was probably invented solely to allow him to survive the climactic beetle-feeding frenzy. There were flashes of laugh-out-loud humour: Hitler organising a 40th birthday party; the strange noises emanating from Erskine's wife in the company of one of his rivals; the foul-mouthed young child (another negatively portrayed female though!), to name a few, and one tut-inducing conceit - the author name-checking himself in his own work! Get over yourself. However,when we tried to recap the story for those who hadn't finished it, those who had read it each chimed in with different aspects of the plot that the then-current-speaker was missing out (the then-current-speaker going "Huh, oh, yes, I remember ..."), showing that this is a busy, multi-stranded narrative from which we each took away something different. We frequently criticise the editing of books we read - A S Byatt's "The Children's Book", for example, could be wonderful abridged by about 300 pages and, here again, a good editor could have been invaluable, dragging the multiple strands and isolated moments and vignettes into a more cohesive whole.
When all is said and done, however, it's my view that the ants will beat the beetles in a fight for the worse book of the year and there's still 6-months for something else to intervene!
Jen:
There's not really much to add to that is there?
Alex:
Excellently put!