The last book I read was Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse', which is a bona fide classic and has the advantage of being almost incomprehensible. I can't stand reading her style for more than a few pages. My brain just won't stand for it. But that was a book I read for my University course and it probably doesn't count.
I don't read many comic books these days. I read a lot of webcomics, though. At some point I will review a few of the comics I bought back in the days when I spent half of my income on comics. OK, so I spent the rest of it on steak pasties and booze. A guy's got to have a few vices, after all. Most of the comics I bought were fairly crap Panini reprints of out-of-date Marvel and DC comics. I had to read a lot of dross when I was looking through that. Because I am an opinionated fanboy I will complain about these books and spout my views from my position on this soapbox. Not that there's anyone actually reading this, of course.
The last book I read of my own volition was Tom Holt's 'Earth, Air, Fire and Custard'. I hadn't read any of the other books in the series. I bought it from the Fantasy Book Club. I was curious. I have heard Tom Holt described as a great humorist, and I enjoy reading comic fantasy from authors such as Terry Pratchett and Robert Rankin. I was keen to expand my repertoire. I had high hopes of this book.
It's not very good.
The plot is hopelessly convoluted. Perhaps somebody who had read the other books would be able to cope. I didn't have a chance. And it isn't funny. It's not even slightly amusing. The dialogue is snappy, the situations in which the hapless lead finds himself are interestingly weird, but the book falls flat.
The main character, Paul is a generic everyman who works for a bizarre magical organisation staffed by goblins and sprites. He's not an original character by any means. He is just an ordinary, ugly loser who wishes he could be someone else. And then he is offered the opportunity to be someone else. It's a neat idea, and it works fairly well. Holt uses it to explore ideals of image and beauty. Paul becomes Phil Marlowe (wasn't he a Raymond Chandler detective?), an example of the condescending, pretty-boy male he would have despised before his transformation. Of course, it can't last forever, but the situation at least allows Holt to explore Paul's relationship with ex-girlfriend Sophie.
After that, one plot twist follows another until the reader is completely adrift and hasn't a clue what's going on. At least, that was the experience I had. It doesn't help that the book has a vast cast of supporting characters. Some of them, particularly the smug and bloodthirsty goblins, are arguably more interesting than the main characters. But after a few chapters, the vast cast became a hindrance. The flow of the narrative was constantly broken as I had to backtrack to find out who people were. It's not a hefty book compared with say, the most recent Harry Potter books, or anything by Robin Hobb, but so much is crammed into those 410 pages that it seemed much longer than it really was. Or maybe that was because the only reason I was reading after a while was a sense of obligation. Holt uses plot twists to ludicrous extremes in this book. He presents one idea as truth and then the next piece of exposition reveals that 'actually, this is what's real', and then the next is 'no, this is real'. Convoluted plots with multiple twists are a staple of many dramas and films these days, but for the most part the book gives no sign that it is mocking any genre conventions. Holt seems to be playing it almost straight. Rather a puzzler, that.
There are some surreal ideas mixed in with the narrative: there's an artificial element (Custard) that allows people to move through an artificial dimension, a talking fridge and a mysterious link between a woman and a sword. These, and loads of other bonkers ideas, constitute most of the plot. It's a messy, insane book, and most of the time it just didn't make a lot of sense to me.
Whenever I don't enjoy a comedy book I think that I may have missed the joke. However, I can't see what Holt was aiming for with this. It isn't funny enough to be surrealist comedy. The plot isn't as clever as he thinks it is. The book doesn't work as straightforward fantasy. If it is supposed to be satire, then it doesn't hit the targets hard enough. It teases the reader with mockery of the machiavellian machinations of a large corporation. It has one good point to make about the hypocrisy of environmentally-friendly liberals who suddenly come into money ("Actually... screw the environment"). But these anecdotes, and others like them, are tiny drops of poignancy in a desert of bewilderment. Satire is not the point of the book. Oh, you could make a case for it, saying that the bizarre and unwieldy plot is a post-modern mockery of... something. But all in all, it's a strange, disorderly hybrid that doesn't really accomplish anything. I suspect that Holt's motivation for writing the book was to see how much crap his readers would swallow. The real joke is that people were willing to buy it.
Verdict: 2/10
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