Book Review: The Winshaw Legacy, or What a Carve Up! (1994) by Jonathan Coe

I'm not even going to try and fully outline the plot of this novel except to say that it's a wonderment of deviousness, coincidence, and mystery--Dickens on steroids. In a nutshell, the eponymous Winshaws are the Borgias of post-war Britain. From a family fortune founded on the slave trade, the Winshaws now have their bespoke talons securely fastened in banking, politics, the arms trade, media, and agribusiness. The central character is not a Winshaw, but one Michael Owen, a novelist with emotional baggage to spare. Owen takes a commission to write a history of the Winshaw family. The person underwriting the commission is Tabitha Winshaw, who has been confined in a mental asylum for the past twenty or so years by the other Winshaws. Tabitha is convinced that her brother Lawrence caused the death of her other brother Godfrey during World War Two. And it's Godfrey's death in the war that forms the coiled spring at the centre of a plot that encompasses tragedy, farce, acidic social and political commentary, mass murder, and some of the most polished comic writing this side of P.G. Wodehouse.

The dexterity of the plotting is breathtaking. The story has multiple narrative layers and voices, bags of characters, and sudden tonal shifts that sometimes put the story up on two wheels. It's understating matters to say that Coe is successfully juggling a lot of balls here; he's also keeping a flaming torch, a roaring chainsaw and an angry cat aloft. This is one of those rare novels that's thrilling because we're witnessing a writer making all kinds of high-risk maneuvers that could end very badly. Let me put it this way: how many writers would dare to incorporate both Sid James (star of the Carry On films) and Saddam Hussein (star of various crimes against humanity) as characters in the same novel?

The Winshaws, all nine of them, are mad or bad, and sometimes both. Some reviews that I came across have complained that the presentation of the family lacks subtlety; that the Winshaws are too starkly villainous. Some of the same reviews have also complained that Coe's depiction of political and social issues in Thatcher's Britain is similarly stark and simplistic. These reviewers are missing the point. What Thatcher unleashed in the UK was nothing less than a conservative counter-revolution against a generation of public policies aimed at creating and improving the social welfare state. Thatcher's "reforms" were as brutal and unsubtle as it's possible to be. To talk about those changes in a subtle manner would be to diminish their intent and dumb savagery. If the Winshaws are presented as posh, greedy brutes, it's because those were the foot soldiers in the war to turn back Britain's social and economic clock to somewhere in the Victorian age. And, of course, there are villains, and then there are exceptionally well-written villains. Coe has created a wonderfully diverse group of monsters in the Winshaws, and while they are all determinedly rotten, they are also very entertaining; although none of them goes so far as too stick their genitals in a pig's mouth. No one could possibly believe that...

If I've made The Winshaw Legacy sound like a polemic, believe me, it isn't. Coe is too smart a writer for that. This is first and foremost a novel filled with keenly observed characters, and some powerful episodes describing human suffering of both the physical and psychological variety. Rather amazingly, these tough elements don't jar at all with comic characters and moments that are often wildly funny. So if your taste runs to state-of-the-nation novels (UK division), make this one your choice rather than Martin Amis' Lionel Asbo, which is essentially written from the POV of a Winshaw. And remember that this novel was written in the early 1990s, long before Winshawism, to coin a term, came to fruition under David Cameron, with hearty endorsement by Britain's financial and media elites.

Nostalgia Comes to Pemberley

So here's the recipe for the BBC's adaptation of P. D. James' Death Comes to Pemberley:

Mix the following ingredients:

2 cups The Antiques Roadshow
3 tbsp. The Great British Bake-Off
Zest from Pride and Prejudice
Juice from six medium-sized RADA actors
One whole plot from a cozy mystery (any author)

Cook slowly over three episodes and finish with a dusting of National Trust fairy dust. Serves millions.

My subject isn't the BBC's fresh-out-of-the-oven Death Comes to Pemberley, which is a pleasant scone of a mini-series if your taste runs to scones, but rather why "nostalgia" TV only seems to exist on one side of the Atlantic.

British broadcasters, especially the BBC, have been producing historical/period dramas for a very long time. It may well one of the terms of their broadcasting licences. In the last ten years or so the rate at which these programs have been produced seems to have increased. Since 2003 the UK has sat down to watch period programs such as Lark Rise to Candleford, The Indian Doctor, Downton Abbey, Parade's End, Call the Midwife, Ripper Street,  and South Riding. Add to this a host of period literary adaptations (Emma, Great Expectations) plus a small army of tweedy sleuths such as Miss Marple and Father Brown, and you have nostalgia being produced on an industrial scale.

The nostalgia business is neither a good or bad phenomenon. British history and literature is extravagantly rich in stories and characters that cry out for a dramatic adaptation, so it's no surprise that producers simply look through their bookcases in order to find their next project, and there's certainly something worthy in a nation celebrating it's history and art. I'd also theorize that the recent spike in the Brit taste in yesteryear is due to the perception that their uniqueness is eroding in the face of immigration, globalization and integration into the larger European community. The British tabloids are full of fear-mongering stories about immigrants stealing jobs, committing crimes, and scrounging social benefits. Even respectable publications and commentators are still leery of the EU. Britain is, after all, the only EU member not to adopt the euro. The dark side to this fear of change, at least as it applies to the TV business, hit the headlines in 2011 when Brian True-May, one of the creators of the hugely successful TV series Midsomer Murders, said that the program didn't show "ethnic minorities" because it "wouldn't be an English village with them...We're the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way." As for globalization, I got a close-up look at how that process has affected the UK when I visited London in 2008. My first trips to London took place in the late '70s, and the London I found then pretty much matched my imaginative vision of the city of Dickens and Wodehouse. In 2008 I found a bigger version of Toronto; the stores, the buildings, everything had a North American look and feel. It was rather disappointing. So if on one level period TV drama in Britain is a celebration of history and culture, on another level it's a barometer of unease with social and cultural change.

The situation in North America is almost the complete opposite. With a few exceptions, history doesn't exist for American TV. Back in the '50s and '60s the TV schedule had lots of period programming in the form of westerns, but from the '70s to the present day it's hard to name a half-dozen prominent shows that were set in the past. There was a short-lived boom in historical mini-series that kicked off in 1977 with Roots, which was then followed by a variety of pulpy and popular productions such as Shogun and The Winds of War. But since then? Nothing really, unless you count Happy Days as a period piece. Mad Men and HBO series such as Deadwood are beloved by critics but they're far from being popular successes. Mad Men's most highly-rated episode attracted only 3.5 million viewers; a crap reality show like Duck Dynasty can easily draw more than twice as many viewers.

The US has a history every bit as varied and colorful as Britain, but it's not a subject of much interest to American broadcasters. One reason for this is that politics has become such a charged and divisive subject in the US that there's probably a reluctance to tackle historical issues that could be controversial. There's no controversy in showing US troops fighting bravely in The Pacific and Band of Brothers, but dramatizing something from the Civil War or the Depression or the American Revolution? Just imagine how Tea Party Republicans and Fox News would react if they felt there was a whiff of "liberal bias" in any examination of America's past. The other reason for the shortage of period shows on American TV is that the citizenry sees the here and now and the near future as being of far more interest. Part of America's self-image is that there's a better and brighter future just over the horizon for every citizen. It's an aspirational ideal that's naive and unrealistic, but it can be argued that it's better than living in the past. It's hard, though, to explain why American TV, including HBO and other niche cable channels, so rarely take the opportunity to adapt American literary classics for the small screen. Why no productions of anything by William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, John Updike, Henry James, Saul Bellow, Ray Bradbury, and a score of other writers? The BBC seems to film novels by Dickens and Austen on a regular rotation, but American's literary giants can't get a sniff at home. The BBC even had the audacity to film James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans in 1971.

So perhaps in the spirit of the "special relationship" and in light of the inevitability of globalization, the BBC and ITV can be tasked with bringing America's literature and history to the world. How about Newport Mansion from the producers of Downton Abbey? Or Ray Winstone starring as Flem Snopes in Faulkner's The Hamlet? And I definitely want to see the lads from Top Gear starring in an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.

Book Review: The Pirates! In an Adventure with the Romantics (2012) by Gideon Defoe

If you saw the Aardman Animantions film The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012) you can be forgiven if you decided to give the book on which it was based (called The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists) a pass. You're forgiven, but you made a great mistake. The film, like any animated film, was aimed for the kids and tweens market. Bad move. The book on which it was based (and the four succeeding titles) are definitely not for kids. The filmmakers basically had to strip the book of its unique comic voice and substitute some standard kid-friendly slapstick and jokiness. That resulted in a film that fell between two stools and, not surprisingly, it stumbled at the box office. There isn't likely to be a sequel.

The Pirates! books are very silly, but it's very much a highly literate silliness that meets at the intersection of Monty Python and P.G. Wodehouse. Here's a sample from The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists:

"You're right, of course, Captain. But I must say I have a certain yen for those big-boned, statuesque blond operatic ladies."
     "Really? I'm more of a 'gazelle-like legs and delicate shoulders' kind of man. Meaning sleek like a gazelle, not with a backward-facing knee. That would be horrible."

And from the Romantics:

"Perhaps I can help?"  said the Captain, holding up his free hand. "When I wake up in the morning, I face a tricky conundrum: do I have my egg poached or boiled? You know where you are with a poached egg. It's all there in front of you, perhaps a little patronising and showy at times, but dependable. Sits nicely on the toast. It's not going to run off with a cocktail waitress, is it?"

Now I ask you, does that sound like the raw material for a kids' film? Gideon Defoe probably made enough on the deal for a down payment on a small London flat, and I say he deserves at least that because writers this funny are exceedingly rare. And it's especially difficult to find authors who can stay funny in book after book. James Hamilton-Paterson, for example, produced a comic masterpiece in 2004 with Cooking with Fernet Branca, but the sequel, Amazing Disgrace, was a disappointment. The Pirates! books score consistently high on the LOL meter.

The Romantics sees the pirates involved with Byron, Shelley and Mary Godwin (Shelley's future wife and the creator of Frankenstein). Previous books have seen the pirates crossing swords with Charles Darwin, Napoleon, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. Describing the plot is pointless, but there are mysterious goings-on, secret passages, and a character whose hair is even more glorious than the Pirate Captain's. Mirth is guaranteed, and I can't think of a better Christmas present than all the Pirates! books for that person on your list who keeps moaning about having to reread Wodehouse because they can't find anything new that's funny.

Book Review: Angelmaker (2012) by Nick Harkaway

First off, with a name like Nick Harkaway the least you can do with your life is write a rollicking, violent, madly entertaining genre mashup of steampunk and SF about a madman's plot to destroy the world. But Harkaway should really be the fair-faced, clean-limbed commander of a frigate, or a polar explorer, or a smasher of plots to steal Britain's secrets and treasures. Instead of any of those more interesting life choices, Harkaway has given us Angelmaker. So be it. I hope he's happy with his decision.

There is simply too much going on in Angelmaker to provide a synopsis of reasonable length, so I'll stick to the highlights. The main character is Joe Spork, a thirtyish mender of clocks and automata, and son of the late and infamous Matthew Spork, a crook's crook in the London underworld. Joe receives a commission to repair a peculiar clockwork device and is thereby thrown headlong into a plot to destroy the world through the agency of the Apprehension Engine, a device that alters human consciousness so that it can always perceive the truth, thus causing, in theory, all kinds of strife. The evil genius behind this plan is Shem Shem Tsien, an ageless Asian dictator who's a charmless combination of Pol Pot and Vlad the Impaler. Tsien is aided by the Ruskinites, a priestly cult that worships John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic. Joe's allies are Edie Bannister, a retired spy who was the Modesty Blaise of WW II; a diverse group of ex-gangsters; and Polly Cradle, the woman who turns out to be the love of his life.

Like the best fantasy/steampunk writers, Harkaway doesn't let anything stand in the way of his imagination, which goes off like an oversized Catherine wheel.  Angelmaker is an excellent adventure story based solely on its imaginative energy and diversity, but Harkaway brings more to the party. Unlike most entries in this field, there's an anger and ferocity and, yes, political consciousness that sets it apart. The political sub-text to the novel isn't overplayed or blatant, but it's clear that the author, like his characters, is disgusted with the Machiavellian machinations of the Great Powers and Vested Interests that result in the existence and use of weapons of mass destruction. Looked at from this point of view, Tsien isn't just a stock villain but the distillation of the anti-human nature of realpolitik and the lust for total power.

This novel must also set some kind of record for Britishness. From its homage to P.G. Wodehouse opening (so good I'm nominating Harkaway for membership in the Drones Club) to it's Lancaster bomber finale, this novel is a feast of British cultural references; even the plot feels like it could have been one of the great Dr Who stories. Which is not to say it's some kind of Rule Britannia wet dream. Harkaway certainly doesn't present the British security services in a pleasant light, and at one or two points this begins to feel like an acidic State of Britain novel.

Harkaway's prose is another plus, shifting stylishly and effortlessly from tough to witty to psychologically acute. But this is also where Harkaway stumbles. The only real flaw in Angelmaker is that Harkaway's prose can also be maddeningly discursive, parenthetical and orotund. This type of writing is best enjoyed in small doses, but too often Harkaway can't put a brake on his rococo digressions. One example: late in the novel, as the tension and narrative momentum is building, we hit a speed bump in the form of a pointlessly lengthy description of a character's girth and sex life. This aside would almost be tolerable at the beginning of the story, but coming where it does it feels like the author is just faffing about. To put it in bald terms, Angelmaker would be significantly better if it was about ten per cent shorter. The other ninety per cent of the book is pure gold.

Book Review: Pull Out All the Stops! (2010) by Geraldine McCaughrean

I've read two of McCaughrean's YA novels in the past year, (Not the End of the World and The Death Defying Pepper Roux), and it's astonishing to think that a writer this good is, by and large, unknown on this side of the Atlantic. The fact that she mostly writes for the young adult market should have no bearing on how she's perceived as a writer. McCaughrean is simply one of the best and most imaginative prose writers I've come across in the last ten years. No contemporary writer I can think of has her facility for creating memorable images and witty observations. This is a writer who sees the world in a new and imaginative way and effortlessly transmits those images to the printed page. This short paragraph from the novel shows off her many strengths:

Twice a year, the Missouri rises. As it drinks down meltwater or tropical summer rain, it loses its head and runs amok. It swells and throbs like the nightmares in Hulbert Sissney's feverish head. Forgetting the maps drawn up by fastidious river pilots, ignoring the dry baked levees, it simply gets up and stretches itself. Overspilling its banks, unpicking its neat embroidery of tributaries—tributaries like the Numchuk River—it spreads out over the landscape, engulfing water meadows, swamps, landing stages and riverside highways. It is an unstoppable surge of chocolate-brown water lumpy with storm litter, staking its claim to everything. And when it has made its point, and withdrawn, it leaves behind flotsam, like a drunkard's tip on the bar: tree stumps, shack roofs, dead cattle, cartwheels. Even boats. 

Not only is the "drunkard's tip" a wonderful simile, it also brilliantly references back to the beginning of the paragraph with the river's "drinking" causing it to run "amok." Someone should put this paragraph on a plaque and stick it beside the Missouri or Mississippi because there's never going to be a better or briefer description of a mighty river in flood. 

Pull Out is the picaresque tale of Cissy Sissney and Kookie Warboys, two 12-year-olds living in Olive Town, Oklahoma in the 1890s. A diptheria epidemic breaks out and Cissy and Kookie are sent to stay with Loucien Crew, their former teacher who is now part of a traveling theatrical troupe. Accompanying the children is Miss March, their present teacher. The troupe, which is called the Bright Lights Theatre Company, is living in a paddle wheel steamer which one of the Missouri River's floods has left high and dry on land. No sooner have the children got to the boat than the Missouri rises again. The kids and the actors are soon floating down the Missouri into all sorts of adventures. 

McCaughrean knows picaresque. In The Death Defying Pepper Roux the title character traveled around France (in virtually the same time period as this novel) having adventures and meeting all kinds of characters. In this book, Cissy and Kookie join a large group of eccentric characters, and as the boat journeys downriver it picks up more characters on top of experiencing various adventures. It's to the author's immense credit that she manages to juggle all these people and adventures in a coherent manner. There's far too much going on in the novel to summarize it adequately, but it's enough to know that it's all wildly entertaining. And, as always, McCaughrean's prose leads the way. Here's one of my favourite lines in the book about a man who's recovering from a close shave with a runaway grain silo:

The idea had come to him in the middle of the night, when a man with a head wound has all his best and worst ideas.

Given the setting and tone of this novel, I don't think it's a coincidence that that sounds like something Mark Twain might have written. And, just for a contrast, here's a lovely description of some pelicans briefly glimpsed at night on the river:

Pelicans loomed white out on the river, drawn by the light, drifting like Chinese lanterns, indistinct and mysterious.

That's poetry, that is. The only reason I'd rate this novel fractionally lower in quality than the previous ones I've read is that McCaughrean shows a tendency, like a lot of English writers who set stories in America, to view everything through a larger-than-life prism. From an English point of view, everything happens in America on a bigger scale and at a greater decibel level than elsewhere, and in this spirit the novel sometimes feels a bit too frenzied, a bit overcaffeinated. One example is that McCaughrean absolutely goes to town on giving some of her characters outlandish names. English writers often seem to give Americans, especially ones from the Old West, improbable  names, which is very much the pot calling the kettle black (say hello, Benedict Cumberbatch), but that hasn't stopped writers from P.G. Wodehouse on down from doing it. 

McCaughrean has written more than 150 books for all ages, as they say, including some adult novels, so it looks like I have a lifetime's supply of great reading ahead of me.

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Book Review: Bloodtide by Melvin Burgess

Book Review: School for Love (1951) by Olivia Manning

Ever read a perfect novel? One in which the similes and metaphors are all pitch perfect, not a single word or sentence is out of place or redundant, the characters are fully-formed and resonate in the real world, and the novel is neither too long or too short? School for Love is such a novel. This isn't to say that it's one of the world's great books, but if it's not in the Champions League of novels, it's definitely well up in the First Division.

The setting is Jerusalem in 1945, just after the end of the war, and a young orphan named Felix has temporarily come to stay with Miss Bohun, a distant relative, before shipping back to England. Also boarding in the house is Mrs Ellis, a young and pregnant war widow. Bohun is the leader of the Ever-Readies, a small Christian sect with a fundamentalist bent. Felix, like any polite, well-brought-up middle-class boy, assumes Bohun will always act in a well-meaning and honourable fashion. He's sadly disillusioned. In the weeks that Felix and Ellis spend with Bohun while waiting for a ship back to England, she doesn't miss a chance to make their lives just a little bit more miserable, not to mention trying to line her pockets at their expense.

Bohun is one of the great, yet petty, monsters of modern fiction. Manning shows that Bohun's holier-than-thou moralizing is, like patriotism, the last refuge of scoundrels. This is not a wildly eventful or dramatic novel, but it shows how tyrants like Hitler and Stalin can also come in more innocuous packages. Bohun is a narcissist, and her self-love stems from her belief that her adherence to Jesus makes her immune from committing the smaller sins. She's parsimonious, mendacious, vindictive, petty, vengeful, not averse to a minor swindle or two, and has a profound lack of empathy. Bohun sees her faith as a trump card to be played on any occasion when her honesty or ethics are called into question by others or even by herself. She's a personality most of us have met or worked with, and the ranks of evangelical Christians in the U.S. are absolutely stiff with this type of person. 

Mrs Ellis is pretty much Bohun's opposite. She's been badly treated by the war but hasn't allowed that to make her bitter or vicious. But she's not a saint. She befriends Felix, who falls slightly in love with her, and eventually loses patience with his dog-like affection and hurts his feelings. At least Ellis is aware that she's hurt Felix. For Felix, his sojourn at Bohun's is a coming-of-age experience that shows him that the adult world is a slippery and untrustworthy place.

School for Love, as mentioned off the top, is brilliantly written. Like other English writers such as Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse, Manning has a deceptively simple writing style that flows beautifully and delivers maximum results with a minimum of fuss. This is such a tight, elegantly-constructed novel it's a wonder it hasn't been filmed. I sense that there's an Oscar or a BAFTA waiting for the woman who gets the role of Miss Bohun. Manning's The Balkan Trilogy was filmed for British television, and the novels that make up the trilogy do belong in the Champions League of great novels.

Book Review: Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950) by Mervyn Peake

You could hold an annual contest to decide which genre Titus Groan and its sequel, Gormenghast, fall into and you would never get a satisfactory answer. To call them fantasy is to suggest they have magical elements, which they don't. They have too much humour for a gothic novel, and alternate reality novels makes them sound like sci-fi or steampunk. And yet the novels do have overtones of all those genres. The best description I can come up with is to say that they have Shakespearian plots peopled by Dickensian characters. Or is it the other way round? The setting is Gormenghast Castle, an insanely large complex marooned in a barren wilderness, seemingly cut-off from any other civilization. The characters, all with names so delicious you could spread them on toast (Deadyawn, Flay, Rottcodd, Opus Fluke, Flannelcat), consist of the Groan family, who rule Gormenghast, and a host of lesser notables, functionaries and servants. The time period? Hard to say, but it feels like the mid-1800s.

The plot revolves around two characters: Steerpike, a kitchen boy who schemes and kills his way to (almost) ultimate power,  and Titus Groan, the heir to the throne of Gormenghast who must eventually confront Steerpike. That describes the major story arc in the novels, but there are a score of minor plots that support or spin-off from the main storyline. Not one of them is dull or distracting. It's in this way that the novels feel like something Dickens might have produced if he'd been a recreational opium user. Peake fills his novels with striking characters but makes sure to give all of them something to do or be a part of. Dickens had an effortless ability to manufacture  unique characters, and Peake is his equal in these two novels. Even his most outlandish characters, the ones for whom eccentricity is something that's only visible in the rearview mirror, have a depth and level of detail that makes them more than just "colourful" characters.

One of the most fascinating characters is Gormenghast Castle. This is a big castle. Peake never gives us any dimensions, but you get the idea that it's probably several square miles in size. And don't think of it as a medieval fortress; it's more of a combination Tibetan lamasery and Italian palazzo. Peake takes us into every nook and cranny of it, and we end up knowing its strange delights as intimately as its inhabitants.

The novels would be remarkable enough based only on their wealth of drama, incident, characterization, and the richness of the prose, but Peake is also an exceptional comic writer. His comic style ranges from slapstick to Wodehousian wit to Lewis Carroll-like absurdity. Gormenghast, in particular, is filled with humour, and you could almost make an argument that it's as much a comic novel as it is anything else.

I suppose the main appeal of the novels is that you never have any inkling of what's coming next in them, never mind what literary genre they will morph into. There are literally dozens of memorable scenes and sequences. A very partial list would include: Lord Groan's mad belief that he's an owl; the hilarious and accidental death of the headmaster at Titus' school; Steerpike's "seduction" of Cora and Clarice Groan; a stunningly awkward party featuring one spinster and dozens of male teachers; and the climactic hunt for Steerpike, which all takes place during a devastating flood.

Are these novels about anything other than entertainment? That's as hard to figure out as the whole question of genre. Everything about the novels is so freewheeling and varied it would be easy to put just about any kind of meaning on them. I think there are two possibilities. First, Gormenghast Castle is a human consciousness, and the wildly various characters that live within it are all the different personality traits, quirks and problems a single human mind can embrace or fall prey to. Second, all of Gormenghast's personalities are templates young Titus can choose and learn from in forming his own character as he grows from boy to man. Or I could be wildly wrong on both counts.

The only disappointing thing about the world of Gormenghast is the third volume, Titus Alone. Do not bother reading it. Peake was dying as he wrote Titus Alone and, not surprisingly, the quality of the writing is pretty poor. There's also a BBC mini-series version of the first two novels that was done in 2000. It has an all-star cast, but it feels flat and stagey, and it completely misses out on Peake's humour.

Book Review: Space Captain Smith (2008) by Toby Frost

If you made a guess based on the cover of this book that what awaits you is something seriously silly, you'd have guessed right. What we have here is a ripping yarn (sci-fi division, steampunk regiment) about an army officer named Isambard Smith who proudly serves the British Space Empire in the 25th century. His sidekicks are Polly, an android sex toy and pilot of Smith's ship the John Pym, and Suruk the Slayer, a bloodthirsty alien warrior and Smith's best friend. In this, Smith's first adventure, he must find and protect Rhianna Mitchell, a hippie with special powers. Smith is protecting her from the Ghast Empire, an evil civilization of ants bent on destroying the British Space Empire. Smith, a two-fisted, less dim version of Bertie Wooster, muddles his way to success and gives the Ghast a damn good thrashing.

But enough about the plot. The success or failure of a comic novel is almost entirely dependent, from the reader's perspective, on the quality of the comedy, not the plotting; P.G. Wodehouse's plots weren't especially clever or original, but that doesn't detract from his position as arguably the greatest writer of English comic fiction. The benchmark for comic writing in the sci-fi/fantasy world is, of course, Terry Pratchett, and on the Pratchett-o-meter Frost scores a very healthy 8.5 out of 10.

Frost, like Pratchett, loves to lampoon popular culture, drop in literary references and quotations, and forge some really diabolical puns. Frost is particularly keen on referencing movies, and there's one especially clever bit in the book built around A Clockwork Orange, not to mention comic riffs on Blade Runner, The Matrix, and even, I think, The Wild Bunch. And Smith's friend Suruk is very clearly modeled on the alien nasty from Predator. Frost's riffs on pop culture are great fun, but the guy can also craft a really clever comic sentence. Here's Smith complaining to a superior about not getting a spaceship to command:

 "You know jolly well that I'd eat my own pants for a chance to get back into space, and yet here I am, still sitting here, wearing them."


Wodehouse himself would have been happy to have penned that sentence. Frost is definitely a very funny writer. What holds him back from Level Pratchett are some double entendres that are a bit too Carry On-ish, and an occasional failure to hold back from making the obvious joke. I will definitely read the rest of the books in this series, God Emperor of Didcot and Wrath of the Lemming Men.