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Toploader [Kindle Edition]

Ed O'Loughlin (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews) |
Digital List Price: £11.64 What's this?
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Review

'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.

Product Description

Flora is a plucky teenage girl. Cobra is a double agent. Flint Driscoll is a reporter. Captain Smith is a military man. Moon is a bored drone pilot. Daddy Jesus is an inflictor of pain. They were never expected to meet, except for one farcical war...
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Product details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 345 KB
  • Print Length: 300 pages
  • Publisher: Quercus (31 Mar 2011)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language English
  • ASIN: B004VRHKVU
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #184,479 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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Ed O'Loughlin
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
great satire of war 13 Dec 2011
Format: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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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
that rare thing 25 April 2011
Format:Paperback
I came to Toploader after having read O'Loughlin's gripping first novel, Not Untrue, Not Unkind and found it to be a very different but hugely effective follow up. Toploader is set in the near but totally recognisable future in the Embargoed Zone--a walled terrorist city policed by various armies and private contractors--and is that rarest of things: a novel that makes you laugh and think. Apparently O'Loughlin lived and reported in the Middle East for various newspapers and his experience there is realised in his harrowing descriptions of the grim geography of the Zone and in the ways war visits the innocent without warning. Channeling Catch 22, Slaughterhouse 5 and Escape From New York, Toploader is a serious novel of ideas that never ceases to entertain. Brilliant.
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