A series of psychotic reviews

Even though I feel The White Tiger is a little slight as a Booker winner - and it does employ many of the same tricks as The Reluctant Fundamentalist on last year's shortlist - I don't think it undermines what I think this year's Prize has eloquently illustrated: 2008 has been a great year for fiction, with the lack of big names hogging the limelight allowing some new talent to impress itself upon the general public's goldfish consciousness.

But the proof copies of new titles are mounting up in piles which have already begun to teeter hazardously, so I thought I'd better start finding out how 2009 is likely to compare. I was tempted by Tim Gautreaux's The Missing, but getting that out would have been too much like a game of Jenga, so I began with Viking's big hope for the forthcoming year, Mr Toppit by Charles Elton.

Even the proofs reflect their grand ambitions: they have dust jackets, die-cut to reveal a detail of another design on the book itself. (Finished copies will be the same, except in hardback format.) There is a purpose to this exorbitance, however, because it is a book about a book, or rather a series of books.

So, the premise: Arthur Hayman was a writer of children's books, the five volumes of the Hayseed Chronicles, which are to become incredibly popular when championed by the American hospital radio presenter who tended him as he lay dying after a road accident. Their main character, Luke, is named after the writer's son, who is later to struggle to come to terms with the public's insistence on identifying him with his literary equivalent. The eponymous Mr Toppit is the baddie of the series, a malevolent omnipresence, who makes a first appearance in the enigmatic last line of the last book; he functions like a diametric opposite to Narnia's Aslan. Luke's discomfort echoes that of A A Milne's son, Christopher, and the furore surrounding the Hayseed Chronicles is modelled on Pottermania.

I don't really like to lay into books too often, especially first efforts, but it has two flaws: the characters and the plot.

As the book vacillates between various points in Luke's growing up, you would expect both he and the other central characters to display some sort of development in their personalities, but they are invariably one-dimensional. Luke himself is perpetually surly, never progressing beyond the functional uncommunicativeness of adolescence. His sister, Rachel, is dippy, easily led and impressed by glamour. Their mother, Martha, is numb and obstinate. Lila, the books' original illustrator, is insensitive and autistically monomaniacal. And Laurie, the American radio presenter, is clumsy in word and deed, caught up in the moment's tide.

It is Laurie, too, who is the weak link in terms of the plot. When the family return to their country home to prepare for Arthur's funeral, this stranger to them all comes along. It's utterly implausible. There's a muddy reference to the family's not objecting, but it seems such socially aggressive behaviour that meek Laurie can't be imagined imposing herself unchallenged. In the subsequent days, Martha dismisses intrusions on the family's grief with a distinct brusqueness on several occasions, but she never objects to Laurie.

Laurie's later progression from hospital radio volunteer to nationally-broadcast chat show host is glossed over in much the same way. It's too remarkable, and frankly unlikely, a development not to require some sort of explanation. And this is symptomatic of the plot throughout: Laurie, Luke and, more intermittently Rachel all turn up and do their narrative duty in isolation from any psychological context.

The plot's one heart-stopping revelation passes almost as an aside, as if all the participants are so wearily accustomed to their lots that it is meaningless. Maybe that's what was intended, but it does rather indicate that the plot itself is fairly directionless, a weak illustration of existential resignation. A poor book from which I feel it is my duty as a bookseller to usher you away.

Still, I don't think I need fear for I might have trampled the delicate flower of some blossoming talent: the author's a literary agent and therefore has the hide of a rhinoceros in leather trousers. My theory is that a great concept has got Penguin so excited that they're blind to the fact that its execution falls very short of its potential. It really is a bad book, so bad it ought to be sent to bed without any supper.

Tearing one book to pieces has given me a vandal's adrenaline surge. So shall we trash another one? I'll probably regret it in the morning, but let's not let ourselves be inhibited in the moment.

The book is Michelle Richmond's No One You Know, due next June as part of Ebury's first big fiction year. It's her first to be published in the UK, but in the US, it's been her mystifyingly well-received fourth, I believe.

It's a thriller, in which Ellie confides all her sorrows to her tutor, Andrew Thorpe, following the murder of her sister, Lila, only to find that he has been accumulating material for a book on the murder case. In it, he reveals his main suspect for the crime, Peter McConnell. When he is acquitted, Ellie is bereft. She has been betrayed by a man she thought was her rock, she has lost her only, very dear sibling, her parents' marriage has crumbled and she doesn't even have the hollow satisfaction of justice. For some time she monitors McConnell, observing him from the far side of the restaurant where he always eats, but eventually he disappears.

Many years later, as a coffee buyer travelling to Nicaragua, she stumbles across him. He had been with Lila on the night she disappeared. The two of them had been working for some time on a solution to a famous mathematical conundrum, Goldbach's Conjecture - and McConnell, it later transpires, succeeded in doing so, although that implausible outcome seems to be permitted to allow McConnell to pay tribute to Lila - and were having an affair. This additional disgrace costs McConnell his family and flees to seclusion in the realm of mathematical theory. He protests his innocence and Ellie is persuaded that the guilty party is still to be identified. She finds Thorpe again and investigates some of the minor players whom Thorpe passed over in his version of Lila's life and death.

The overall story works well enough, even if the narrative is rather too simple to satisfy as a whodunit of any species. But there are some plot points which don't ring true, some inconsequential, some fundamental. An example of the former occurs on Ellie's first buying trip: although she has a couple of years' experience as a coffee taster, it is supposedly a remarkable revelation to her that it takes 2000 coffee cherries to produce a pound of coffee. And, more reprehensibly, an example of the latter would Ellie's complete failure to comment on, or even notice, Thorpe's constant note-taking when she talks to him about her sister's murder. I started jotting these incongruities down, because at the time I thought I might be missing something, but I stopped after seventy or so pages when it became clear that the book was fundamentally flawed, or at least carelessly edited.

When the final twist came, I presumed that it was a red herring, as there were still over fifty pages to read, but instead it just wound down over almost a sixth of the book. It made me think of Bartledan, the emotionless planet in Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless, where all novels finish after exactly 100,000 words, even if that occurs mid-sentence.

I think I should go a little way to undoing the damage that I have wrought by highlighting a decent book. As a bookseller, I can hardly send people away without recommending something. So Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward, published by Faber in April, is bloody marvellous. Reading in the blurb that he'd written it in the form of one continuous paragraph - it's nearly 300 pages - nearly put me off, but the book both justifies the effect and makes the most of it.

Its characters live in a run-down council block, all living lives of drugs, violence and false hope. Some of the cruder opening scenes were uncomfortably like much of Irvine Welsh's Filth - a book as dire as Trainspotting is sublime - but it's a book full of nuance and wit, allowing its characters' true natures to chivvy the plot along with just enough impetus to reach a cathartically moving conclusion.

By the way, it's his second book, he's twenty-three and the film rights to his first have just been bought by Hollywood. And he's nice, utterly lovely in fact. Tch!

On the subject of new talent, I've found it disappointing that so much new radio comedy over the last couple of years has been so turgid and clunking, the first Laura Solon series and most episodes of Ed Reardon's Week aside, that my ears were fair twitching with pleasure on hearing Radio 7's 15-minute sketch show on Sundays, A Series of Psychotic Episodes.

It's a little raw in its both writing and presentation, but the humour is so sharply original that it seems apparent already that its writer, Miriam Elia, is going to be a star (or at least constantly passed over by commissioning editors in favour of supposedly 'edgy' attention-seeking dross). Episodes are available for the time being on the BBC website and it's worth a listen for, amongst my favourites, the sketch 'Postmodern Pat and his Abstract Cat' and this wonderful line:

Were you born in the eighties? Then you may be entitled to compensation.

Life and death after Douglas Adams

(Originally published on 3rd August 2007)

I went to my first book launch in a few weeks last Thursday, for a magical first novel called Gods Behaving Badly, in which the gods of ancient Greece are living in undignified squalor in a shabby terraced house in Islington. Some of the gods try to apply their deific skills top the modern world: Artemis is a professional dog walker and her brother Apollo a TV psychic. But their modern lives are mundane and largely impotent; it takes the appearance of the doughty Alice, their cleaner, to bring some excitement and purpose back to their eternal existences.

The author, Marie Phillips is, wonderfully, gloriously, a former bookseller; she proffered the opening chapters of her manuscript to a sales rep, Peter Fry, who took it straight to Dan Franklin, grand fromage at Jonathan Cape. He read it, immediately phoned her to ask for the rest and made her an offer the next day.

It's the first genuinely funny new novel I've read for longer than I can remember: it made me laugh out loud on the tube, which undoubtedly had me fixed in the withering yet oddly stoic glare of my carriage-mates. What makes it stand out is the dialogue, a trick which evades most authors, who either end up with characters sounding like they've spent their entire lives under the direction of Noel Coward or else spouting some sort of ersatz street-talk which has been researched by means of sitting on the top deck of a bus at the end of the school day.

Essentially, she has Douglas Adams' ear for comic dialogue. (I mentioned this to her at the launch and she delightedly pointed out that the appearance of one of the lead characters in a dressing gown was in homage to dearly departed Douglas.) The opening scene, where Artemis comforts a tree which had been an Australian accountant called Kate until she rashly declined a particularly blunt proposition from Apollo, is the spirit of the book in microcosm. When Artemis describes Kate's new appearance to her, she takes comfort in her foliage.

"Are you sure I haven't gone mad?"

"I'm sure," said Artemis. "You're a tree. A eucalytpus. Subgenus of mallee. Variegated leaves."

"Oh," said the tree.

"Sorry," said Artemis.

"But with variegated leaves?"

"Yes," said Artemis. "Green and yellow."

The tree seemed pleased. "Oh well, at least there's that to be grateful for," it said.

"That's the spirit," Artemis reassured it.

In an appearance on Radio4's Bookclub (or something similar) some years ago, Douglas Adams asserted that the biggest influence of his writing style had been A A Milne. It instantly made sense. He used the same, blunt verbless sentences, with rambling pomposities thrown in as the plot and characters demanded. He cast sentences so that the eye is drawn to the absurd. He even capitalised for emphasis. All in all, there's a certain flow to it, one that works well when spoken out loud but also has the internal poetic rhythm that is the gift of the most stylish of prose writers, the staccato combined with the mellifluous. And I think Marie Phillips has that too.

Athena's wisdom is now lost in the hubbub of accountants' jargon and marketing gibberish; Dionysus spends time concocting and field-testing his revoltingly potent home-brew; Hephaestus is the epitome of the amateur DIY enthusiast. The book is appreciative enough of the mythos from which its immortal cast comes to make it a knowingly satisfying book for the lay classicist. But it also updates the stories delightfully: who could fail to be tickled by the notion that the Angel tube station is the gateway to the Underworld? Certainly not me, having arrived for the launch via that station in heat in more conducive to cake baking and then travelled up those escalators so long that they look as if they've been filched from the set of A Matter of Life and Death, accompanied by the less than celestial strains of a busker murdering Baker Street on an oboe (although eight out of ten for effort there).

Anyway, Gods Behaving Badly is out now and will be a book I shall suggest at every vaguely appropriate opportunity to our customers. So when you get a copy for Christmas from that distant and eccentric relative who has heretofore alternated between getting you bilious and grossly oversized knitwear and gift sets of rather manky cosmetics from Superdrug then you may well have me to thank for the hours of entertainment and the excuse to absent yourself from the post-prandial charades and ceremonial watching of the Harry Potter film.

Speaking of Douglas Adams, in the news today was the sorrowful conclusion that the baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin, is now believed to be extinct. The connection with Adams is that the baiji was one of the animals he sought out with naturalist Mark Cawardine in their book on endangered species of the world, Last Chance To See, published in 1990. At the time of his visit, the Chinese government had set up an ambitious project to preserve the dolphins' habitat, but the demands of industry have been, it would seem inevitably in a rapidly expanding economy, impossible to ignore. Having advanced all the usual arguments in favour of promoting biodiversity, Adams concluded that there was one more reason to preserve curious evolutionary culs-de-sac such as the kakapo and the Komodo dragon: "the world would be a colder, darker, lonelier place without them". Today, of course, we know he's right.

To compound this note of loss and regret, I'll conclude with a rather sad little quote from the editor of The Dandy, Craig Graham, announcing a relaunch of the 70 year-old comic as Dandy Xtreme.

"Following extensive research, we discovered The Dandy readers were struggling to schedule a weekly comic into their hectic lives. They just didn't have enough time. They're too busy gaming, surfing the net or watching TV, movies and DVDs."