Wot i ave bin reeding

[angelophile]

Robert Harris's new read, The Ghost, is frankly a disappointment after his superb period novels Imperium and Pompeii and Fatherland, the thriller set in an alternative present where the NAZIs had won WWII and even such lesser reads as Archangel and Enigma. It's probably his most predictable thriller, lacking the fascinating historical punch of his other novels as he plunges, instead, into the world of modern day politics.


If you buy the supposed hype, Harris is playing Judas to his sometime friend Tony Blair by writing a thinly veiled attack on his time in power, which will have the conspiracy theorists rushing to back him up. Ostensively the tale of a ghost writer drafted in to complete an ex-Prime Minister's memoirs after his predecessor on the project dies under "mysterious circumstances", it revels in its unsubtle comparisons between fictional Adam Lang, until recently a Labour PM slavishly subservient to an incompetent American president, now formally charged with war crimes thanks to the resentful ex-colleague he fired as Foreign Secretary and Blair. No doubt if you're one of those who thought V for Vendetta was a cutting political statement you'll love the brutal unsubtlety of this one, where the ex PM is supposedly ZOMG evil! For me with my rather ore cynical nature, it was like being lectured on world politics by a twelve year old student who's just seen a Michael Moore film.

However, it's not the politics that are offensive, since I couldn't really care less about those this novel mirrors, it's simply the naivety and simplicity of the storytelling. While in the past Harris has produced intelligent thrillers, this is not intelligent. It's big and dumb, the very things the novel seems to be taking offence at, with every plot twist signposted in twenty foot high letters pages in advance so when the shocking plot twists appear, it would have taken a mental midget not to have spotted them coming.

In short, it's a lazy thriller and a poor allegory. Perhaps it'll appeal to a certain sector of the readership who'll delight in submitting it as evidence that the Blair government was completely corrupt, but it has about as much value as evidence as The DaVinci Code and follows the same uninspired formula.

In two words: hugely disappointing.

Likewise, Terry Pratchett's new novel Making Money lacks the teeth to make it a satire and the humour to make it an effective comedy. Like a lot of Pratchett's work lately, I found it a little wishy washy and like its predecessor, Going Postal, which features the same cast of characters and set up, it seems to start in one direction and then suddenly introduce another factor and go off at a tangent, as if Pratchett ran out of ideas and decided to throw in an idea from another novel to try and balance things out.

I'm sure it'll appease the majority of long-term fans, but I certainly wouldn't recommend this book to a new reader. It's hobbled by picking up a lot of the elements from Going Postal and if you haven't read that book, I imagine the plot and characters would be even more confusing. It had remarkably few of the hallmarks of a Pratchett book - not very funny, hardly any fantasy, not that smart and very easy to put down. It was actually rather a challenge to plough through it and I ended up putting it down often and alternating with another novel. It suffered, as well, from a slow plot, muddled and confusing, generally not very satisfying and so many "in jokes" that it felt rather as if Pratchett was just coasting on past success. The familiar is good, but once a joke grows familiar it also outgrows the funny, especially when analogies, synonyms and jokes are being reused with regularity. Pratchett's managed to create some truly memorable characters – Vetinari, the witches, the Night Watch, the faculty of the Unseen University – but along the way he's also had a tendency to come up with a lot of cardboard cutout characters who aren't very different from each other and despite his attempts to flesh Moist out a little more, the central character's actions and attitudes are indistinguishable from too many of his protagonists.

All in all, this book is nothing new, nothing very interesting and nothing at all surprising. There's already a follow up announced and I don't think I'll be rushing out to pick that one up. Pratchett appears to be coasting now and running with whatever "modern concept stuck on the Discworld" idea he comes up with, like he has in the past. It seems like he's more concerned with churning out the two novels a year than taking his time and coming up with a decent narrative and that's a real shame.

In four words: More of the same.