Carnage on the Committee (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

I don't usually buy books in hardback or read book of this type, but for Carnage on the Committee, I made an exception. I would recommend this book for anyone looking for a very entertaining read. The only thing I would say is not to do what I did and read it in public as people look at you strangely when you giggle uncontrollably on a bus.

Although the Knapper-Warburton Committee, some of whom get bumped off, is charged with awarding a Booker-like prize and we are intrigued to find out whodunit, the real plot here is the skewering of the self-regarding posturing of figures in the academic and literary worlds. We have the Queer Studies, gender-concerned, politically correct, Derridean deconstructionist and self-invented stereotypes which might become burdensome if not for the poisonously witty pen of Dudley Wright whose lampooning is both deft and good-humored. Lady Jack Troutbeck, who insists on being called 'Madam Chairwoman' to the gasps of some of her committee members, is a real creation, one I'd love to meet in real life, although I might find myself cringing if she were to decide to puncture my own personal balloon of pretentiousness.

Anyone who has ever sat on an academic or prize committee will find much that is deplorably recognizable here. The madness is all leavened by the 'bloody good guys,' as Lady Jack calls them, who bring some sanity to the proceedings.

Thumbs up!

Scott Morrison

Irish author and scholar Ruth Dudley Edwards does not write fiction for the faint-hearted reader. Her mysteries all feature English civil-servant Robert Amiss, as well as a cast of supporting cast. Her best known supporting character is Lady Ida "Jack" Troutbeck, a booze guzzling,cigar-smoking, bi-sexual, un-"PC", head of a woman's college at Cambridge. Jack Troutbeck says what she thinks, and what she thinks is often at odds with Britain's "New Labour", which was in power when Dudley Edwards wrote and published "Carnage on the Committee".

The "committee" is the "Knapper-Warburton Committee", a Booker-like committee, whose nine members - including Robert Amiss - are charged with getting together to select one novel as that year's honoree of the prize. And the clever Dudley Edwards has made the eight members caricatures of the prevailing literary elite who people the real prize selection committees. Several murders occur and Robert Amiss enlists Jack Troutbeck's help by taking over the committee's chairmanship, left vacant by one of the murder victims. Dudley Edwards does not stint in poking fun at the pompousness of the literary insiders nor at the worthlessness of the books under consideration for the Knapper-Warburton. There are several laugh-out-loud scenes, for those who enjoy the un-PCness with which Dudley Edwards writes. Dudley Edwards has long satirized the British Establishment - brilliantly in "Publish and be Murdered", another Amiss/Troutbeck mystery, set a the "Wrangler", a suspiciously "Economist"-like magazine.

But if Dudley Edwards satirizes, she also points out truths. Her two page piece in her latest book, "Murdering Americans", gives the most beautiful explanation of America and her place in history and in the world I've ever read. Please seek out Dudley Edwards' fiction. She writes wonderfully, and often has some wonderful "truths" in her work.