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glittertiggerI had good intentions for this morning, but it was raining and I felt lazy, so I spent it reading a Ben Elton book recently passed on to me by a friend. She did warn me it wasn't his best work - I must learn to listen to these warnings...
The cast comprises an insipid heroine, two ghastly obsessive men and a few bit-parts. There are several hundred pages of tedious arguments about gender politics in which very little happens, with occasional, but not nearly frequent enough, flashes of wit. The messed-up timeline doesn't make it more interesting. I skipped large sections, but the story hadn't noticeably progressed when I dropped back in. There are also a few foreshadowings of doom, and I really couldn't decide who I most wanted to die. At the end, out come a knife and a gun and both obsessives, plus an innocent bystander, die horribly leaving the heroine quaking in the wreckage. Just as I was thinking "that was a better ending than expected" I find a saccharine extra chapter in which the heroine finds happiness with an equally insipid minor character. In the author's defence, maybe the publishers made him add it? As with so many books, I found myself thinking there was a half-decent but much, much shorter book hiding in all the rubbish. Whatever happened to editing?
Am now heading off to the Oxfam bookshop to play with some better books and do something useful with my day. Hope you are all having an enjoyable weekend.
The cast comprises an insipid heroine, two ghastly obsessive men and a few bit-parts. There are several hundred pages of tedious arguments about gender politics in which very little happens, with occasional, but not nearly frequent enough, flashes of wit. The messed-up timeline doesn't make it more interesting. I skipped large sections, but the story hadn't noticeably progressed when I dropped back in. There are also a few foreshadowings of doom, and I really couldn't decide who I most wanted to die. At the end, out come a knife and a gun and both obsessives, plus an innocent bystander, die horribly leaving the heroine quaking in the wreckage. Just as I was thinking "that was a better ending than expected" I find a saccharine extra chapter in which the heroine finds happiness with an equally insipid minor character. In the author's defence, maybe the publishers made him add it? As with so many books, I found myself thinking there was a half-decent but much, much shorter book hiding in all the rubbish. Whatever happened to editing?
Am now heading off to the Oxfam bookshop to play with some better books and do something useful with my day. Hope you are all having an enjoyable weekend.
