Toploader
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'At times, the satire is reminiscent of Joseph Heller or Thomas Pynchon in the way it embraces the sheer stupidity of the situations it describes, but unlike those authors, O'Loughlin adds eloquent and thoughtful political discussions, which do not disrupt his fast-paced narrative' Simon Creer, Times Literary Supplement.
'O'Loughlin spares time for striking imagery and some rather beautiful writing' Toby Clements, Seven magazine, Sunday Telegraph.
'O'Loughlin's cool, distanced gaze holds our assumptions about terror and security up to a queasy, uncomfortable light with an extraordinary and unsettling calm' John Burnside, The Guardian.
'O'Loughlin is impressive in his description of the imposition of military might and its human consequences' David Park, Irish Times.
'Cynical, funny, harrowing and revelatory, Toploader is one of the most inventive Irish novels of recent times' Declan Blake, Sunday Business Post.
'a darkly comic satire on contemporary imperialism' Irish Independent.
'O'Loughlin spares time for striking imagery and some rather beautiful writing' Toby Clements, Seven magazine, Sunday Telegraph.
'O'Loughlin's cool, distanced gaze holds our assumptions about terror and security up to a queasy, uncomfortable light with an extraordinary and unsettling calm' John Burnside, The Guardian.
'O'Loughlin is impressive in his description of the imposition of military might and its human consequences' David Park, Irish Times.
'Cynical, funny, harrowing and revelatory, Toploader is one of the most inventive Irish novels of recent times' Declan Blake, Sunday Business Post.
'a darkly comic satire on contemporary imperialism' Irish Independent.
Product Description
Spying inside the Embargoed Zone is an expensive business, not to say risky, and Agent Cobra wants his wages in full. But his down-at-heel spymaster can only offer payment in kind - and the first thing he finds in an unattended storeroom. And so both men are sucked into the mysterious Toploader project, a race to retrieve a deadly secret from inside the world's first - and best - walled-off terrorist entity. Also caught in the crossfire are a resourceful teenage girl, a gung-ho reporter, a hapless drone-pilot and at least one very unfortunate donkey. Toploader is about to make their lives a lot more dangerous, and an awful lot more bizarre.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Toploader, top book, top author,
By Fairy Godmother (jerusalem, israel) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Toploader (Paperback)
Armies don't lend themselves to satire. Their business is killing, something that requires a very special author to find and work a seam of humour. Graham Greene did it with Our Man In Havana. Joseph Heller did it with Catch-22. And now Ed O'Loughlin, a relatively new author who is blazing quite a trail for himself having caught the eye of the Booker Prize judges for his first novel, has produced something that is quite simply pitch-perfect.Set in a ghetto of `terrorists' (think Warsaw 1939 only with Predator drones flying overhead capable of reading the DNA of every single inhabitant in the enclave) we are introduced to their `enemy', a well-supplied, hugely-resourced army that bosses them brutally from beyond the perimeter wall. The `army' has no end of tricks to justify its bullying. When it kills children it cooks up stories about the children blowing themselves up accidentally while building `terrorist bombs'. When it hears that its mortal enemy might have infiltrated the enclave there is no limit to the army's retribution. And when a piece of hi-tech gadgetry (a computer chip) is lost inside the `terror zone' the gloves come off to get it back. We meet soldiers who are incompent, officers who are lazy, terrorists who are more terrified than terrifying, spies who are spineless and commanders who have no moral compass. O'Loughlin creates a setting that is futuristic but in our modern world of Green Zones in Baghdad and Fire Support Bases in Afghanistan his writing soars with plausibility. Delicate humour and acute observation tease out the terrible truth that we can all sometimes display such venality and cruelty. This book is acid, thought-provoking and chillingly funny. Greene and Heller have a worthy heir.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A dark and very funny satire on modern war,
This review is from: Toploader (Paperback)
This is a brilliant black comedy, set in a modern day war zone which resembles the Gaza Strip - except that it is evidently somewhere in Europe. It starts with an exploding donkey but takes in the full gamut of war as it is fought today, with fighter bombers, artillery strikes and tanks used against the defenceless inhabitants of the area known as the Embargoed Zone.O'Loughlin gives us the story of this squalid and bizarre little war from multiple points of view: soldiers; officers; residents; spies and journalists. It would be impossible to summarise the plot, which follows its own mad logic. Suffice it to say the "top loader" of the title is a washing machine, which disappears into the Embargoed Zone and becomes the subject of a frantic search. Among O'Loughlin's targets for satire is computerised war, where soldiers in bunkers direct deadly air strikes from drones. The soldiers are all young, ignorant and naïve; the officers are self-serving and corrupt. Then - this being the 21st century - there is 24 hour television news. A ludicrously egotistical reporter, Flint Driscoll, is one of the most memorable characters in a devastating portrayal of the superficiality of much modern war reporting. There is plenty of horror here and quite a lot of gruesome deaths. But mostly it is very funny, with a rich cast of comic characters and some good running gags. I really did keep stopping to laugh out loud. O'Loughlin has a serious subject - the way language and technology can distort the reality of war. But he makes his point with a barrage of deadly humour. This really is a Catch-22 for our time.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
great satire of war,
By psychothriller (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Toploader (Paperback)
One of the most interesting things Ed O'Loughlin has done was give all protagonists Western type names - nobody, whether "terrorist" or Army (U.S. Army - recognisable from MASH and Catch 22) has a 'foreign' name. This means that it is easy to identify with everyone in it - except maybe Daddy Jesus, the sadistic torturer from the army. People are trying to live, trying to make a living, in the most awful of circumstances, living in the Exclusion Zone - is it in the Middle East? or Bosnia? or where? They speak the same language as the Army - except in one way: the way the Army uses language is always with an eye on the main chance. For the Army, everyone in the Exclusion Zone is a terrorist. If the Army ever killed anyone in your family, your terrorist rating rises and you become more dangerous and more deserving of being hunted down. A washing machine - a toploader - is made to seem as if it contains a highly secret microchip.......but does it? Did someone just want an American washing machine, rather than a European front-loading one?Thoroughly enjoyable book. There is no escape for Flora, or any of the rest of us who are living in the Exclusion Zone i.e. anywhere outside the USA.
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