Review - Thursdays in the park
Oh Jesus, make it stop.
Reading this is like literary waterboarding, with slurry.
It’s worth noting that this edition at least had 1.5 line
spacing, so it’s actually a slim novel.
Better still if it had been anorexic.
The first page has a husband criticising his wife because
she drinks too much. Certainly
reading this book drives one to the booze, so actually being a character in it
would inspire a terrible thirst one would imagine.
So far, so formula, the reader gets all of two thirds of the
way down the first page before wondering when the first vicar is going to pop
up. In that at least, the book
does not disappoint (page three, in case you were wondering).
Full disclosure: writing this review was something of a
challenge, as the most straightforward way of conveying my opinion of this book
would to be to take a well-used carpet knife and gouge the words ‘THIS IS
SHITE!’ into the cover of the book.
Then smear it with excrement.
Then torch it.
I freely acknowledge that this is an over-reaction. There is no place for the exclamation
mark in any considered review.
So just how bad is it?
Let me express it this way.
If the Taliban’s media strategy had been to post one of their trademark
fuzzy, foam flecked rants on Youtube with some bearded arse pointing to a copy
of ‘Thursdays in the park’ and screaming ‘this is where educating females to
write gets you’, and not ‘let’s shoot schoolgirls’, then I’m not saying anyone
would be any more accepting of their wicked message, but maybe, just maybe,
they’d be playing a little less dodge-the-drone every time they popped out of
the cave for some fresh milk.
This is a sad, unhappy and deeply cynical book.
Why cynical?
The author has clearly thought carefully about the demographic of her
readers and how to convey that her principal character is successful and
affluent. Hence, early on, it is
established that the main character’s kitchen has Bosche appliances and is
decorated with National Trust paint.
Mid-range appliances and a paint brand more associated with heritage and
tea shops than actual decoration sends a message alright, and that message is
‘the author looked round her kitchen and described what she saw’. It’s
cynically judged to appeal to people who either want it confirmed that they
have achieved the sort of middle-class life that they read about, or who aspire
to owning a Bosche cooker and decorating with National Paint. It’s also not right. Affluent people who live in leafy
suburbs of London have Agas and decorate with Farrow and Ball paint.
Sad and unhappy because it’s full of sad and unhappy
characters. Everyone in this book
is, to a certain extent, sad and unhappy and that includes, by about page
seven, the reader. The principal
character is unhappy because her husband has moved into the spare bedroom and
won’t explain why. Her daughter is
unhappy because her husband is annoying, the husband is unhappy because he is
an unappreciated artist, the bloke the principal character meets in the park is
unhappy because, oh, I don’t know, either he’s a widower or allergic to trees
or something.
There are a couple of toddlers involved.
In fairness, they are not unhappy.
But by Christ they’re irritating.
The toddler also provides the plot driver for the Great
Peado Scare.
It has a plot so formulaic that this novel could have been
packaged not so much as an e book but rather a powerpoint slide at the sort of
desperate conference held at a hotel chosen for its convenient transport links
rather than its beauty, where the chef is on the run and the rest of the staff
are hoping to be deported back home any day now.
Positives?
Well, it’s quite short, and it confirms all the prejudices one might
hold about the sort of people who frequent health food shops, but essentially
it’s an exercise in grinding frustration unhappy married to a failed attempt at
being a novel seeking to examine the relationships of family life across
generations and the effect dramatic change can have on what are thought to be
certainties.
Labels: Books, e publishing, Kindle, Reviews
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home