Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Enjoyable, lightweight read, 8 Mar 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
So, this short novel (it's not long enough to be a novel in point of fact, it's actually a novelette) is a parable, and a fairly simple one at that. But there's nothing wrong with simplicity in the right hands.
The relationship between the main characters - three West Indians responsible for running a Gents' public toilet - is nicely captured and full of humour. They refer to the numerous cottagers who frequent the place as 'reptiles', and take action to deter them, by 'draining the swamp'. However, such is the popularity of the place with homosexuals that this leads to a loss of income, meaning keeping the place open becomes uneconomic.
Near the end, one of the West Indians - Jason - eventually leaves to return to Jamaica with his two women in tow. He's disillusioned with 'whitey', considering us to be cold - just like the reptiles who visit the toilets.
The final solution to keeping the place open involves a volte-face from the two remaining men running the 'establishment'.
I was actually enjoying the book immensely until the ending - which let it down somewhat. In fact I was vaguely uncomfortable with it. But some scenes resonate in the mind and occasionally take the book to a higher level.
The claims about this being a 'masterpiece' and a 'startling, wonderful book' are nonsense; it's nothing of the kind. It is however an engaging read for the most part, but too throwaway to be considered a classic.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Dull, but at least it's short. , 9 Mar 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Three Jamaican men working in a London Underground public lavatory wage guerilla war with the cottagers who use their conveniences, until a threat to close down their facility results in them taking over the place and reevaluating these clients as sources of revenue.As this is an entirely inconsequential tale, one imagines it to be a metaphor - the parable being, I suppose, about how economics changes personal morality, or perhaps it's a metaphor for privatisation.
The book had two glaring faults for me - the clunky, Creative-Writing-Class prose - a lot of the text being just pointlessly long-winded descriptions of everyday activities, dressed up in some very dodgy similes (do tube trains, for instance, really 'pass each other like tongues of flame?' Nah.)
Secondly, the book is something of a rip off, being a short novella disguised as a book by judicious use of double spacing, a large font size and a lot of white space. It took about 45 minutes to read.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent and minimal, 30 Dec 2007
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
This short book tackles issues of homophobia and racism in a non-judgemental way, treating the reader as an observing adult.
I read it in under two hours and felt nourished by the experience. If only more novelists wrote so well - not a word wasted, and every word chosen carefully. The author conjures images, sounds, and smells from sparsely written descriptions. The characters are described by the actions and their reactions to each other, rather than by the author telling us what each character feels.
I would heartily recommend this book - it is set in a world we occasionally visit, but know little about.
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