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Matt Thorne, Independent on Sunday
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Customer Reviews
The shocking thing about the book is that you find yourself not only agreeing and empathising with him, but also relating to him on subjects that you would much rather keep to yourself!
I have never read a book so fast!!! Well done Christopher Hart
The narrator and central character is Daniel Swallow. Fired from his job in advertising after a mishap involving three minor but much-loved television personalities and a hot air balloon he becomes a gigolo and from there his life gets much more complicated. Meanwhile, he might be falling in love with his friend's girlfriend, and one of his former co-workers is having a hard time trying to woo a beautiful colleague. Let the fun begin.
And Rescue Me is hugely fun, but not entirely agreeable. It was the characters I had the biggest problem with - on the face of it they are very sympathetic, and we are clearly expected to feel for them and hope for the best as they attempt to sort out their romantic complications, but I found it difficult to sympathise with a bunch of well-paid, well-read, Oxbridge educated men and women of the world, who spend most of their time smoking pot, enjoying casual relationships, holding witty conversations and reading Musil.
The writing is decent but inconsistent. In the same chapter as the beautiful line, "If I kissed her now she would taste childishly of toothpaste," Hart includes the superciliously self-conscious horror, "And still the sun shines down on us, happy for us. Pathetic fallacy, I know, but as pathetic fallacies go it's a good one." The quality of the comedy makes up for this though. Great one-liners abound, and there are some brilliant comic set-pieces, including two separate incidents involving Daniel's inept friend Clive whis is hilarious.
Rescue Me is a good comic novel, easy to read, and easy to enjoy. Its major flaw is Hart's inability to pick a genre. He combines toilet humour such as the above with some deeply mawkish episodes and adds in some testing cultural references as if to assert the novel's literariness. The best way I can describe it is as holiday reading for scholars. It works, but it's uncomfortable. Similarly, the book is highly likeable, but not entirely satisfying.
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