Wednesday, July 30, 2014

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.

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