Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Couldn't find Neverland, 29 Aug 2008
I got increasingly irritated while reading this book and almost didn't finish it, but pursued it in order to find out exactly how the author was going to wrap up the story he had started. Not sure why I bothered. Too clever for its own good it culminates in an orgiastic apocalypse and redemption finale that left me feeling cheated. I'd lingered with these stuffy, privileged unsympathetic characters for what? Loaded with obvious Peter Pan references in both characters and locations, it is an attempt to bring Barrie's ideas into a modern setting but does so with such a knowing air that it upsets the pace of the book - the reader is forced to slow with the glacial progress of the characters' thinking whilst the obvious signposts indicate the way things are heading. As the central characters muse on the events portrayed they seem to wilfully ignore the evidence that is in front of them. For example, we are expected to believe that none of them has read Peter Pan, for why else would his name never be mentioned? A child such as Timothy would surely explore the connection when confronted by a boy in green sitting in a tree outside his window (doh! who could that be?).
Topical? - well, throw disaffected youth, computer gaming, fundamentalism, oil, and a Middle Eastern back story into the pot, finishing with a fist full of sex and violence and yes there is a topicality there but again it seems very arch and knowing. Not rocket science to find interest in those areas but in the end to me it smacked of sensationalism and a way to add colour to aid the colourless characters. There is something very male-centric about this book too, despite the mother/carer/lover roles played by the females. Maybe that is to be expected in a book called Lost Boys but there is something fetishistic about the detailing of weapons or vehicles which smacks of badge-collecting and male obsessiveness. If that is the point then for me it often becomes tedious and gratuitous.
Some good writing is not enough compensation for the weariness I felt when putting this book down, an enervated feeling of having ridden on a disappointing fairground ride and thinking, is that it?
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Well-written and topical supernatural thriller, but lacks originality, 4 Jul 2008
Lost Boys starts out like a Lord of the Flies examination of adolescent mindset and the dynamic between groups of middle-class boys who have come into contact with a darker side of the world and deep primitive impulses. It's superbly compelling and sinister, establishing a slightly unsettling supernatural tone when the boys, many of them sons of foreign diplomats and high-profile international businessmen, start to disappear, lured away from their comfortable lives by a recurrent common dream of a young foreign boy.
An investigator soon identifies the connections between the disappearances but the conclusions and the scale of the problem are too disturbing to contemplate. Lost Boys then takes on a J.G. Ballard tone, examining and relating the destruction of the middle-class Western family values and a generation exposed to increasing levels of violence, terrorism and wars, not only in video-games and on television, but in the whole nature of the turbulent state of world affairs. These serious concerns are tied up in the most brilliant and suspenseful of intrigues, the supernatural elements only highlighting the underlying horror and absurdity of our relationship with Asian and Middle-East nations and the exploitation of their people and resources.
It's topical certainly, but unfortunately, as the novel develops, the debt it owes to other works becomes more and more apparent. With the missing son, a fractured middle-class family, and a father with a guilty colonial secret receiving threatening anonymous videos, it's perhaps most reminiscent (if not actually derivative) of Michael Haneke's 2005 film 'Hidden' (Caché). Well-written, Lost Boys is a fine and relevant read then, if not exactly as deeply original or as challenging as those works it all too obviously references.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Literary fiction? I don't think so, 9 Nov 2008
I only didn't drown this book in the bath (where I do most of my reading) because I'm attending my first book club meeting where this sorry offering is on the table.
How could Beryl Bainbridge give it a good review? How could one of the other reviewers here talk about "luminous prose"? I suspect that was a family member.
It is embarrassingly badly written. Cliche upon cliche. Clunky metaphor after leaden simile. I wouldn't normally quibble, but the tag of literary fiction sets up expectations. I'm astonished that an author who lectures on fiction isn't mortified to read back his own prose, so lazy and laboured as it is.
There wasn't a believable character or the pull of a plot to make reading pleasant. He had an interesting idea, and he wrote it out, doggedly. Unfortunately he killed the interest in this reader at least because he can't actually write well. How does this stuff get published?
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