Me And My Big Mouth

Demob Unhappy

My mission to read all of the Brian Adliss books I am reissuing (background info here) before I actually reissue them continues with the final instalment of the Horatio Stubbs trilogy.

The Hand-Reared Boy saw Stubbs wanking his way through his teenage years. A Soldier Erect followed him in to World War II (lots of shagging at the beginning but then some really quite devastating battle scenes towards the end). A Rude Awakening is set in Sumatra after the war has ended, Stubbs is waiting to go back to Blighty and is killing time by shagging a Chinese woman and shooting crocodiles, neither of which end well.

It is a bleak book. Stubbs is torn between marrying Margey, his Chinese fancy lady who may or may not be a whore, and bringing her home with him or dumping her and buggering off back alone. He is bored, fed up and irritable, picking fights with his fellow servicemen and generally having a miserable time. Sumatra itself is humid and dangerous, with the Indonesian independence movement shooting Dutch soldiers whenever the opportunity arrives, something Aldiss captures splendidly with the frustrated, sweaty tone of Stubbs narration.

A Rude Awakening is not as funny or sexy as its predecessors but it still packs a punch and contains one or two unforgettable scenes. The whole series is, supposedly, loosely autobiographical which makes my visits to Chez Aldiss all the more interesting, tempted as I am to ask him about various episodes contained within the books (although I haven't yet plucked up the courage to do so).

I am issuing The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy as ebooks (3 separate volumes plus an omnibus), another publisher has the print rights, and do so in July. It will be interesting to see how a modern reader takes to these books, which were quite controversial when they were first published.

Four Lost Stories

You may recall I got all excited about a long out-of-print science fiction book I read a few weeks back called The Road to Corlay. Well, that novel was based on a short story (quite a long story, as it happens) in this earlier collection so I hunted it down and have been dipping into it over the past few days.

I won't post a long review here as I have reviewed each of the separate stories (there are only four of them) over at my other blog, but in brief:

The Custodians. A small group of Spanish monks in a remote hillside monastery guard perhaps the greatest secret in history. Chilling.

Paradise Beach. A rich banker becomes obsessed with a lifelike futuristic painting. Very Tales of the Unexpected.

Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The prequel to The Road to Corlay, and every bit as magical as the novel.

The Hertford Manuscript. A 17th century book hides the journal of a 19th century time traveller. Great fun.

The Custodians by Richard Cowper is not currently available in print but you can pick up secondhand copies online for not very much money. A copy would be, in my opinion, a wise investment.

Not Wank

I wasn't expecting to enjoy The Afterparty. I thought it might be a bit too gimmicky for me.

Let's look at the evidence.

• Contains a novel-within-a-novel.
• Chapters are broken up by emails between the fictional author and his fictional agent.
• And then the 'real' author, Leo Benedictus, gets involved as well.
• Each narrator has a different font.
• There is a section at the end with deleted scenes and a collection of tweets about the book.

See? Surely it is going to be a load of wank?

But no. It is, instead, a hugely entertaining satire of celebrity culture, our fame-hungry media and corrupt tabloid press. I started reading it last Saturday morning and found it very hard to put down. Thankfully it was a lovely day and most of the family had buggered off out so I was able to read it in the garden undisturbed.

But I haven't actually told you what it is about.

A lowly newspaper sub-editor blags his way into a famous movie star's private birthday party using his boss' invitation. He starts out by very awkwardly mooching around in the full knowledge that he shouldn't really be there but soon, and quite accidentally, he gets sucked into the action and is instrumental in setting off a chain of events which culminates in some major unpleasantness for all concerned. It is witty and clever - I especially liked the way the different narrators would often overlap - but, and this is important, it never vanishes up its own arse.

Which is a good thing as the author is our guest at Thursday's Firestation Book Swap, alongside former Guardian political editor, Gaby Hinsliff. Why not come along? It is only £5 on the door or free if you bake a cake. Details here.

It is also a good thing because this very same Book Swap is mentioned in the new paperback edition of The Afterparty. When it was announced that any tweet using the hashtag #afterpartybook woul be printed in the paperback I decided to tweet a plug for the Book Swap and it duly appears on page 385. We are immortalised in print.

Pulp Fiction

Valdimar Haraldsson is very fond of fish. More than fond, really. For twenty years he has edited and published a journal extolling 'the link between fish consumption and the superiority of the Nordic race'. He's awfully keen on the stuff.

So imagine his dismay when, as guest on board a Danish merchant ship transporting raw paper pulp from Norway to Turkey a few years after the Second World War, he is served nothing but meat for days on end. He has been invited on board by the owner of the shipping line, whose late son had been a contributor to Haraldsson's journal, and is loath to complain so elects to fish for cod over the side of the ship instead.

He is soon able to provide some hearty pescatarian fare for the captain's table, not that his fellow passengers and crew seem all that grateful. They are far more interested in the tales of the second mate, a seasoned traveller with a series of remarkable stories to tell.

For this old sailor claims to be Caeneus, former crewmember of the Argo itself under the command of Jason. Yes, that Jason, the golden fleece one. No one seems to challenge him in this regard, content as they are to hear his recollections of that voyage and the adventures of his fellow Argonauts.

Sjón's books are a blend of myth, fable and legend (if there is indeed a difference between the three). They are both vague and precise at the same time. Vague in that you cannot be quite sure what is real and what is imagined. Precise because the language is economical and spare, nothing seems out of place. His work is slowly building a considerable following, helped by wonderful translations from Victoria Cribb (both their previous collaborations have been nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), and I suspect that this will prove to be his most popular yet.

The Whispering Muse is peculiar, dark and hugely rewarding.

My interview with the author is worth a look if you have a few minutes.

Martha Reviews: I am Not a Loser

Please welcome my 10-year-old daughter, Martha, who wants to tell you about I am Not a Loser.

The book is about a boy called Barry Loser who is quite popular until a bit in the story when a boy called Darren makes him unpopular. I can't tell you how he does it but it is quite funny.

Barry spends most of the rest of the book trying to become popular again by doing lots of weird stuff to get himself noticed but it doesn't work.

It's a really funny and weird book with cartoons and text a bit like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. If your kid liked that book then I reckon they'll like this one.

I'd give it 4.5 out of 5.

Standing to Attention

A Soldier Erect continues the story of Horatio Stubbs, wanker extraordinairre and hero of The Hand-Reared Boy (which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago). We left him at the end of the 1930s and join him in 1944, in India. He is now part of the Forgotten Army, the poor unfortunate buggers who were destined to fight in the Burma campaign only for their achievements to be widely ignored at the time.

Not that there's much fighting going on at the beginning of the book. The soldiers are in India, supposedly being trained for war but largely hanging around and trying to get laid without their superior officers finding out what with all the local ladies being 'riddled with the pox'. The book is full of tales of squaddie banter and is not afraid to examine just how bloody boring a lot of them found it while they were stationed there. Although not boring enough to actually want to go to war.

Aldiss is also happy to share some of the less pleasant aspects of military life. Here we find Stubbs on a train in India.

And on the subject of water rations.

Stubbs does manage to squeeze in a few visits to local brothels, and these are often quite disturbing episodes given the age and disposition of the ladies on the receiving end of his attentions, but these are as nothing compared to the stories he tells of battle itself.

The Battle of Kohima forms the climax of the novel, specifically the fight for Aradura Spur, and here the banter ends. The soldiers who have been shagging, joking, fighting and scrapping along together for most of the book are now on the front line - a wet, miserable, confusing and dangerous front line - and it is impossible not to be moved as these young men begin to fall.

That last line is a killer.

I have read quite a bit of war fiction but none that has managed to balance the banter, the boredom and the mundane with the harsh and heartbreaking reality of battle in quite the way this does. It was not what I expected at all but is quite unforgettable.

Full disclosure, for those who do not know. I am reading my way through most of Aldiss' novels as I am bringing many of them back into print over the next few years. A Soldier Erect will be published as an ebook in July, both singly and as part of a Horatio Stubbs omnibus. I am enjoying the experience very much indeed.

All Customers are Psychotic

I have mentioned Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops a few times on my blog already so I won't go on at length here but I am duty bound to report that I have just finished reading the thing from cover to cover and it is fucking hilarious.

I rarely laugh out loud when reading books, very few books are actually that funny, but this one had me chortling, tittering and even guffawing on almost every page.

Check out my interview with the author, Jen Campbell, for some comedy gems (not all of which are actually in the book).

Or, better still, just go out and buy a copy from your local bookshop. But be careful what you say, the sneaky fuckers are listening to your every word.

Messing About on the River

You may recall that I struggled with Master & Commander by Patrick O'Brian a few weeks back. The narrative was so steeped in nautical terminology that I failed to spot any plot, characterisation or anything else of interest. I gave up after 100 or so pages.

No such problem with The Watermen by Patrick Easter which I zipped through in less than two days. Set at the end of the 18th century it follows the formation of London's river police through the story of Tom Pascoe, one of its first recruits. Once a captain in the merchant navy, he has had to seek work elsewhere after his ship is looted while moored in the Thames, resulting in him getting the sack.

It is also the story of a rivalry between Pascoe and and Irishman named Boylin. Boylin once served under Pascoe and suffered two hundred lashes at his command. The two men hate each other and Boylin, now a criminal plying his trade on the river, wants Pascoe dead.

Throw in a bit of a love triangle involving a young nurse and you have a walloping good yarn. O'Brian may be hailed as one of the greatest historical novelists of all time but I found him unreadable. Easter is almost certainly far too entertaining to be hailed in similar fashion but I know which of the two I am more likely to read again.

Definitely a book for the Father's Day shortlist in a couple of months time.

After the Floods

I picked up three books by Richard Cowper at a local charity shop a while back. They were £1 each and I couldn't resist this cover in particular. I hadn't heard of the author before and didn't know what to expect but plucked this one off my shelves during a recent flurry of short book reading. At 154 pages, I thought I could polish it off in a day.

As it happens, I took a bit longer than that. I paced myself. I was enjoying it so much I didn't want it to end.

The Road to Corlay is a classic chunk of 1970s science fiction, although I would argue it probably ticks more fantasy boxes than SF. Nonetheless, it says SCIENCE FICTION in big letters on the back, just above the 80p RRP (88p in the Rep. of Ireland), so science fiction it is.

In the year AD 3018, Britain has succumbed to floods and is now split into seven separate island kingdoms. The deluge has, it would appear, destroyed all technology and the inhabitants have reverted to an almost Anglo Saxon way of life. In this ancient version of a modern world, the soldiers of the Church are hunting down members of a peaceful religious sect. One believer, Kinsman Thomas, is travelling in secret across the kingdoms in an attempt to deliver a precious relic to a new home in France.

Meanwhile, in the early 21st century, a scientist goes into a coma while undergoing a brain experiment. When his brain patterns are monitored they show images from a strange land.

Cowper creates an entirely believable universe, everything here makes sense, and his risky decision to juxtapose the two timeframes does pay off. There is something quite magical about this tale and I found myself completely wrapped up in it. I suspect that if you enjoyed Game of Thrones, or even the Dark Materials trilogy, then you'll like this rather more gentle tale (although it does have its brutal moments) of many kingdoms and a domineering Church. If you can hunt down a copy then it comes with a hearty recommendation from me.

I notice that, while it is out of print in traditional form, many of Cowper's books have recently been reissued as ebooks and The Road to Corlay is amongst them. If you are a SF or fantasy fan with a Kindle then get clicking.

This book is the first in a trilogy. I will now seek out the others.

It's Alivre!

(Apologies for the terrible pun).

I am very lucky as my kids, now 10 and 13, still allow me to read to them every night. The books we share have evolved over the years and we are now into what they call Young Adult territory, with occasional swearing and everything.

I am good at the swearing.

We recently finished Mister Creecher by Chris Priestley. His previous books, all variations on a theme, that theme being bloody scary stories, have been a source of spooky bedtime enjoyment over the years but this one was a bit of a departure. It is a reworking of Frankenstein, placing the monster, post-creation, in London where he befriends a young boy, Billy. I say 'befriends', he actually scares the shit out him to start with but a relationship slowly builds and Billy agrees to follow Dr Frankenstein on the monster's behalf as he travels round London in search of, well that would be telling.

Suffice to say we have a neat variation on the traditional buddy story which was enjoyed by every member of the family. It is dark and unpleasant in places, enough to scare the youngest and delight the eldest. It also throws in sufficient references to its source material - at one point Billy bumps into Mr & Mrs Shelley outside the British Museum - to amuse the adults.

But it is one final literary reference, one concerning our young hero, which really cranks the book up a notch. Towards the end we are presented with a revelation which took everyone in this household by surprise, and impressed us too. We were still chatting about it days later.

I can say nothing more without giving it away, and I would want you to come across this particular treat yourselves.

On the Plus Side

I have been reading a lot of short books recently. Can you tell by the flurry of reviews? I am on a roll. Go me.

Bar Balto by Faïza Guène was one of them. I didn't like it very much.

It started out promisingly enough. The owner of a bar is found dead on the floor of his establishment, naked and covered in blood. He narrates the opening chapter himself (nice touch) and subsequent chapters are narrated, in turn, by the various murder suspects. All of them, Orient Express style, have a motive. None of them are prepared to fess up.

They reappear as the short, pithy chapters continue and more of their stories are revealed until you discover whodunnit.

I had two major issues with the book. The first was that I found the voices utterly unconvincing, especially those of the younger characters. This is surprsing as the author is pretty young herself, still in her 20s. And yet she fails to make a 20-something girl sound remotely realistic. This is a problem and one which annoyed me more as the book went on.

But not as much as the ending. Which was shit. When the truth is revealed it is not only a massive disappointment, it is also painfully contrived and completely unbelievable. I could have forgiven its flaws if it had produced a cracking ending. It didn't.

On the plus side, it was mercifully short.

A Day in the Life

I have so many lovely things to say about this book.

You probably know the premise of A Single Man , either because you have read the bloody thing or seen the acclaimed film adaptation with Colin Firth (which, I should point out, deviates from the book in a number of crucial areas) but in case you haven't here's the very short version.

It is a day in the life of an Englishman teaching at an American college during the early 1960s. He is a gay man. His lover has died in a car accident a short time before the story begins. We follow him from his morning routine through to bedtime and a couple of that days' events reveal glimpses of his wider story.

George is quite a sad man - he misses his lover and regrets the passing of years that render him older and more cantankerous - but he has a dark wit about him that sparks every so often in the pages. And the author, Christopher Isherwood, lights up these pages with some wonderful passages.

I loved this one. George is having a shit when the phone rings.

Or this meditation on the daily commute and the perils of women's lib.

It is also a very tender book. George deeply mourns his lost lover and the prejudices of society that kept them from being openly together. I was moved by these few lines which describe that most perfect of reading experiences, sharing some quiet time with the person you love.

Every few pages I stumbled across a line, or an image, or a piece of dialogue that made me smile, or think, or that simply impressed me with its straightforward brilliance. This is a most splendid book, one from the top drawer, if you have yet to read it I strongly urge you to do so.

Spoilers Ahoy!

OK, can someone please explain to me why Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is revered by many and generally considered to be a classic? I am stumped. Really stumped.

When discussing this on Twitter last week a good friend commented that all art is subjective, which is true, but I can usually work out what appeals to people about certain works of art even if I don't personally like them. I can't stand the Beatles but understand why they are popular, and so on.

But I cannot latch on to anything from Heart of Darkness whatsoever. It was ponderous and dull.

Have I missed something obvious?

Bloke gets job for a Belgian trading company. Goes to Africa to pilot a riverboat. Boat has been scuppered so he hangs around for three months waiting for it to be repaired. He then sets off to rendezvous with a chap named Kurtz who runs one of the trading posts, about whom he has heard lots of rumours. As the boat approaches the post it is attacked by natives. Turns out they were working under Kurtz's orders. Kurtz is ill, has a bit of an episode and dies. Bloke brings the body back and visits Kurtz's fiance a year later. The end.

What was the point? We spend most of the book building up to meeting Kurtz and once we find him he has a bit of a spasm and drops dead.

I realise I can be a complete Philistine at times and perhaps that is the case with this, so please enlighten me. Thank you.

A Novel Narrated Vertically

Sometimes you read a book that doesn't completely blow you away but which you know has something, a certain something, that means you can't wait to read what the author writes next.

Faces in the Crowd is a novel told in fragments. Or, as Valeria Luiselli prefers:

Short pieces - often only a sentence long, rarely more than a page - accumulate to tell the story. Or three stories to be precise.

Story One. A woman is at home in Mexico with her husband and two children. They are preparing to move to a new home in Philadelphia, a home the husband is designing. While waiting, she writes a novel.

Story Two. That novel is based on the time she worked for a New York publishing house. Her job was to spot hidden gems of South American literature for her publisher to translate and launch on an eager public who were already lapping up all the Bolaño they can get their hands on. She becomes interested to the point of obsession with an obscure Mexican poet named Gilberto Owen and fakes translations of his work that look set to fool the literati and take the publishing world by storm.

Story Three. Gilberto Owen sneaks into the novel, or perhaps the novel within a novel, narrating whole sections, set in the 1920s, himself.

This is, effectively, three partial novels split into small pieces and its ultimate success or failure depends on how well Luiselli has stitched them back together. There are certainly some wonderful fragments, especially in the family scenes; the author is particularly good when she takes a snapshot of domestic life. Such as here:

Or here:

(I've been taking pictures, can you tell?)

And while I concede that, in this instance, the parts are probably greater than their proverbial sum, the book is a bold experiment and the author almost pulls it off. She's close enough that I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and I'd love to see what she does next.

Special mention should be made of the translation by Christina MacSweeney. Now, as I cannot speak Spanish (I struggle enough with English) I cannot really judge the quality of the work but anyone who manages to translate 'subwanker' has impressed me no end.

So, as I say, not perfect but a more than impressive debut. Mark your card.

A Marmite Book

I had no idea quite how many people disliked Wolf Hall until I happened to mention on Twitter last week that I was starting to read it. I was under the impression that it was almost universally loved. How wrong I was.

My Twitter feed was instantly bombarded with tweets from a whole host of people, some respected writers and book bloggers amongst them, pointing out why they hated it so much. Common complaints were:

• It has a huge pronoun problem.
• You cannot tell which character is speaking, and there is lots of dialogue which makes that even more of an issue.
• There are too many Thomases.
• Nothing much happens, and the little that does takes ages to actually happen.
• It is too bloody long.

This intrigued me but did not put me off. I knew of just as many people who had greatly enjoyed it. I ventured on with high hopes pretty much intact.

And the opening section, in which a young Thomas Cromwell runs away from his drunken shit of a father, was a cracking read. I enjoyed it. I felt in the groove. I loved the tone. This was shaping up to be really rather good.

150 pages later and I closed the book in frustration. I will not be picking it up again.

All of the beautifully bullet-pointed complaints above are valid but I would actually suggest a couple of additional reasons that I have decided to give up.

The over-reliance on dialogue - I would estimate that 40-50% of the text is direct speech or reported speech - means that the characters are slow to reveal themselves. So slow that a quarter of the way through the book I still had no real idea who Thomas Cromwell actually was. I had no opinion of him whatsoever. It is hard to drum up any enthusiam for a book when you cannot give a shit about any of the people wandering around within its pages.

And a lack of emotional clout. In the 150 pages I bothered to read, poor Thomas loses a wife and two daughters (sorry, spoiler alert!) and I felt nothing. It was hard to tell if Thomas felt anything either. Once I reached that point I realised I really couldn't be bothered to read any more.

So I stopped.

I'd love to hear from you if you disagree with any of the above or if you are one of the many Wolf Hall fans. Tell me I am wrong. After all, it won the Man Booker Prize, has sold nearly half a million copies and the sequel is one of the most eagerly awaited books of the year so there must be lost of people who did manage to give a shit. I just wasn't one of them.

The Book You Can Read Between Meals Without Ruining Your Appetite

There is a certain and very particular pleasure in reading a book in a day. A sense of achievement. It needs to be a long book, mind, none of your novellas or poetry collections. Fine as they are, they're just, well, too short to really count.

There was once a time when I regularly polished off a book in a day. This was a time before I had children. Or any responsibilities to speak of. I would happily sit in my armchair for hours on end, only surfacing to attend the call of nature or shove a bacon sandwich down my throat. Happy days. I am welling up just thinking about them.

Well, I turned the clock back on Saturday (metaphorically speaking, otherwise it would have been awfully confusing what with actually putting the clocks forward on Sunday) by reading The Hunger Games from start to finish. Go me. Why the rush? Well, we had booked tickets to see the movie on Sunday morning and I was overcome by the urge to read the novel beforehand. This was accomplished by forgoing all social engagements (OK, I had none) and largely ignoring my family (they didn't mind). 450 pages after I started, I was finished. Simple.

A review at this point is hardly worth anyone's time. The books have sold nigh on 30 million copies and the film had one of the biggest opening weekends in cinema history. But I will say this. I found them both to be gripping, genuinely thrilling and intelligent. They pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable as children's or teenage entertainment about as far as they could go. The film achieved what the best adaptations have to - it took out the weaker bits of the book and ensured the additions helped the narrative - and the perfomances, especially that of Jennifer Lawrence, are top notch.

I realise a great many book-to-movie franchises are over-hyped and disappointing. I dare to suggest that this is one rare exception.

And I shall end with this. As soon as we got home from the cinema, Martha picked up Ethan's battered old copy of The Hunger Games and read the first 100 pages or so in one sitting. It is that kind of book.

Confession Time

I have never seen the movie Blade Runner.

There, I said it.

I have read the book, though. I finished it at the weekend.

I always told myself that I wouldn't watch the film until I had read the book which, as many of you know, is actually called Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?.

It is written by Philip K Dick, one of the greatest writers in any genre but widely held to be the finest exponent of science fiction there has ever been. I am a big fan of his work, particularly his mainstream non-SF stuff, but had never quite got round to this, his most famous novel.

Of course, it is his most famous because of the cult film that it inspired. It isn't actually his best book, not by a long shot (please shout if you disagree). It is, well, sort of OK.

You probably know the plot. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter. He kills androids for a living. When a particularly sophisticated bunch of androids are reported on the loose he has to track them down. But here's the thing. We are told constantly throughout the book how clever and devious and hard to spot these androids are and how dangerous it is for Deckard to be hunting them. This build up is tense, paranoid and exciting. But when it comes to the final showdown [I suppose I should announce a spoiler alert here] it is pretty bloody easy.

Which actually made for a disappointing ending. I realise that the film is quite different to the book and that Dick wasn't writing this for the screen. As with many of his novels, this is a study of the many flaws and foibles of human nature and isn't intended as an exciting shoot 'em up, but having heard so much about it over the years I feel rather let down. It's not terrible but it is far from his best work.

A Biased Review

I am biased when it comes to Japanese fiction. I can forgive an average book because of the insight it provides into a world which fascinates me.

The Devil's Whisper is an average book. I just about forgive it, but I wouldn't recommend it.

A taxi driver runs over a young woman late at night. There are no witnesses but the victim's dying words in the back of the ambulance suggest the driver was guilty of reckless driving. He is arrested and it falls to his nephew, Mamoru, to investigate the circumstances surrounding the accident.

Mamoru discovers that the dead girl is linked to two previous deaths via an article in a, shall we say, 'specialist' magazine and as he delves further he unearths information relating to his own difficult childhood.

This book is full of convenient coincidences. Mamoru just happens to have been trained by a retired locksmith in how to pick locks. Working in the book section of a department store he knows the ideal person to speak to when checking out the background to the dodgy mag. The department store itself yields up an important clue via a totally improbable storyline. It is all too far fetched and I didn't believe a word of it.

Oh, and ten pages in you will work out the main twist which is made obvious by the title.

All that being said, I am always interested to read Japanese fiction, to get to look at aspects of the culture, and Miyuki Miyabe is that country's bestselling mystery writer (it says so right on the cover) so at least I am reading something that many thousands of Japanese have enjoyed before me. As I result, I found pleasure in the details about day to day life and the routines of ordinary people, much more so than any enjoyment to be had from the plot.

But before I go I should point out that I loved All She Was Worth, a Miyabe novel I read some years ago. A gently paced story of an elderly detective trying to trace a missing woman. A book I would recommend you seek out rather than this one.

Ad Men

When I reviewed it back in 2010 I described The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd as 'Dead Poets Society with John Berger as the teacher'.

The Learners, its sequel, is Mad Men reimagined by Simon Garfield (he of Just My Type fame). It is a wonky look at the world of advertising through the eyes of Happy, our narrator from the first novel. He has left college and started work in a small advertising agency, coincidentally (deliberately) the very same agency that his beloved college professor, Winter Sorbeck, started at many years previously and also coincidentally (deliberately) in the home town of Himillsy Dodd, the firecracker of a young woman he fell in love with in The Cheese Monkeys.

That suggests a fair bit of harking back to the previous volume but it isn't essential to have read that before tackling this, although you'd be a bit stupid not to as we have already established that it is a very good book.

The spark that ignited The Cheese Monkeys was the genius of Winter Sorbeck and how he managed to get a disilluioned group of students to think completely differently about design, and consequently their lives. Winter is noticeable by his absence from this book but Kidd throws in something (almost) equally interesting in the form of the Milgram experiments. One of Happy's first jobs is to create an ad for Yale University, the very ad used for the controversial scientific study. This seemingly straightforward collection of fonts on a page goes on to have major consequences for Happy.

[If you are unfamiliar with the Milgram experiments then there is a good explanation here and an interesting reenactment on YouTube.]

While perhaps not quite as thought provoking and inspirational as Sorbeck they do add a fascinating backdrop to the rest of the novel, a classic bildungsroman if ever there was one. I'd got as far as to say that, taken together, The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners comprise one of the best coming-of-age stories I have ever read. They also contain some of the most eccentric and enjoyable characters I have come across in fiction. I consider them essential reading.

Me the Annoyed

Either Justin Torres has photographs of lots of famous authors in compromising positions or this debut novel really has impressed the likes of Michael Cunningham and Marilynne Robinson who masturbate frantically over the back cover in the form of quotes.

'a brilliant, ferocious new voice'

'a gorgeous, deeply humane book'

'an indelible and essential work of art'

'brilliant, poised and pure'

What a lucky bastard. But surely this slim little volume can't be as good as that?

Well, after the first few chapters I was beginning to think that it might be. This tale of a poor family trying to make ends meet - dad often away working for days on end, mum hard at it on the night shift, three boys amusing themselves around the neighbourhood - was perky and surprising and full of great passages of writing.

Try this for size.

For the past few weeks we had been dressing in oversize camouflage from a box of hand-me-downs Ma had brought home from work. Someone had died, someone army. We cut the sleeves and the length from the shirts; we wore cargo shorts as pants. We fastened everything with green canvas belts and sliding army buckles. There were caps and bandanas and exactly three olive-mesh tank tops that shrank in on themselves and were meant to be worn tight but draped on us, the shoulder holes opening down to our waists. The mesh shirts were our favourite, like wearing nothing at all.

Manny smeared a thumb's worth of shoe polish under our eyes, then we stepped out quietly through the door and crept along the side of the house, slipping underneath a hedge, army spies. For the past few weeks, we had been at war.

I like that. Clever but not trying to show off too much. Evocative. Quite real.

So much so that it felt like a memoir. One of those posh literary misery ones, like Running With Scissors or something.

And there I was, enjoying it quite a bit when I realised that my mind was wandering. The writing was great but the story was not quite as strong. A collection of set pieces that weren't really having any sort of cumulative effect. The three brothers were merging into one with no clear differentiation between them.

But then, as I was approaching the final few chapters, the story took an unexpected turn. Not a twist, as such, more a development that came out of nowhere and which felt, well, wrong. Completely wrong. It annoyed me. It changed the whole tone of the book and was followed by a few pages of utter nonsense. Art wank which meant nothing.

As a result I closed We the Animals glad to see the back of a book which had opened with such promise.

A real shame.