|
41 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Caveat emptor, 29 May 2005
With more than 120,000 books being published each year in the UK, it must be really hard for first-time novelists. How do you find a publisher, and how do you get reviewed?Well, one way is to marry Zadie Smith, the darling of the book world. Her White Teeth, a pretty OK novel but nothing special, received rave notices from her pals in the media. They tried their best to find anything at all to praise in her follow-up, and could not. Zadie had run out of steam, assuming she'd had any to start with. But of course her reputation had been established. It was easy for Nick Laird, a fairly mediocre poet from Northern Ireland, to get published and reviewed when his name was linked with that of the great Zadie. And their mates in all the best broadsheets and literary papers queued up to tell us what a fine poet he is. Unfortunately some made the booboo of quoting a line or two, and that gave the game away. Advice to reviewers: keep it bland and general and for heaven's sake don't quote, or the great reading public will see through your dishonesty when you're plugging so-so work. Which brings me to Utterly Monkey. If you wondered why it was claiming so much review space then wonder no more. It's not a bad book, but it's hardly outstanding when set alongside the 462 other novels that appeared when Nick's, did but which never made the books pages. If you ain't "in" you can't win. Reviewers have even tried to suggest that Nick deliberately refrained from writing a "poet's novel" by keeping the vocabulary, well, prosaic. He certainly succeeded in that. But I'm left wondering if he can actually write poetically at all. There is little evidence of that here. What Nick is so good at is going out of his way to avoid "cliché", trying instead to put his own word-spin on things. In fact trying to do what Julie Burchill did so brilliantly in her heyday. He fails so often though, because he has neither her vocabulary nor brilliance. Likewise his characters: I'd have preferred them to be stereotypes rather than the unrealistic though "clever" inventions Nick seems to go for. Utterly Monkey is way too self-conscious for its own good. But then, Nick has a reputation to live up to. He has to convince the critics that his work justifies their hype. It's such a pity that the same kind of con that Hollywood and the music industry perpetrated for so long now seems to have poisoned the book world. I mean: generations have grown up with the misguided belief that if an actor stars in a great many movies then s/he must inevitably be a great actor - rather than a friend or couch companion of the producer or director. Similarly the many thousands of "resting" actors in Britain must be disgusted when the same tired old faces appear night after night in TV dramas. By the same token, the many competent performers who scrape by with gigging in pubs at the weekend can't be happy to see talentless, tone-deaf acts enjoying all the success. On a level playing field Nick Laird would certainly not have achieved the success and recognition he enjoys. As a lawyer he should know the meaning of caveat emptor. It should be stamped on Utterly Monkey and anything else he produces. In the end it's the buyer who'll decide his worth and not the less-than-critical book critic.
|
