I Was Tempted to Make This Review a Mediation of When Exactly the Likeable Arsehole Line Is Crossed, but Thought Nah, Better Not

 

Sorry, I’ve been a bit sluggish with this one. I had every intention – really, I did – of completing this one in time for the book club two weeks ago, but things got in the way.
Like work.
And Charles Stross’s new book.

This book holds a very, shall we say, odd place in my personal rankings; one that is shared with just one other book that I have read recently – Charlie Jane Anders ‘All The Birds In The Sky’. Both of these books left me with the same odd feeling of liking the authors well enough, but with the disapointment of the actual books themselves not working for me. Both had some high points, but in each case the book was less than the sum of its parts.

It’s a really stange feeling – you finish reading the book, put it down, and your reaction is to go ‘Huh.’

 

The most significant problem I had with this book is that – to put it bluntly – the majority of the main characters are a pack of arseholes (George gets a bit of a reprieve), and this lead to me suffering from a bad case of arsehole induced apathy. Struggling to care for the characters really didn’t help me connect with what was going on. I think things may have gone a bit better if they had just one or two more redeeming qualities. Then I might’ve been able to engage with them in the same way I engage with the main characters in Archer or The Venture Bros, where I find bad things happening to people who are mostly arseholes to be frigging hilarious. But sort of like a cast of Peters taken from the later episodes of Family Guy, that line was not quite reached.

Or in the case of Saul, that was never going to happen.

 

Another problem I had was the sort of meandering narrative style, which took me a while to warm to. The side plots, while often amusing, threatened to strangle the main narritive. Initially, being dragged out of the story to deal with weirdo Jungean dreams was a bit of a pain in the arse. But weirdly enough, once I reached a certain point I sort of started looking forward to all the odd interludes. And to give credit to Craig Ferguson, the way he manages to tie everything together at the end of the book, despite all of the dancing around, is actually rather clever.

The other aspect of the book that I liked, and was even rather impressed with, was Ferguson’s mediations on religion and his mocking of the Hollywood fame machine. And while some of his references to real life people are a little cheesy, they managed to be pretty amusing as well.

So, as you might be able to tell from the messy, slightly disorganised review, I found this a bit of a messy, slightly disorganised book. But underneath it all, Craig Ferguson shows some real wit and some skilled writing. I think this is what makes me want to give him another go – I’m tempted to check out his memoir.