Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Well, four and a half, really., 12 Dec 2002
If you know "Withnail and I" (or the excellent interviews "Smoking In Bed") you may have an idea of what to expect.However, did you know that Robinson is fixated with Dickens? And it shows. It has been a long, LONG time since I have read a book with such a gleeful, inventive and precise control of the English language. But, aside from Robinson's written-voice par excellence, the author also reveals himself as a beautifully controlled narrator and handles this rites of passage with such delicacy that you'd be a fool to not have a knot in your chest come the final pages. "The history of its meat clung about this house like a climate."
Excellent!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Black humour ago go, 14 Oct 1999
By A Customer
A mixed reception for the writer and director of Withnail and I and from those who expected something in similar vein to his previous work, applause. I shall not give a detailed synopsis of the book or even one at all for there are bound to be other reviews posted here. What I would suggest is that if you are a bit of a fan of Bruce Robinson then read it. If you read a review of it, other than this one, you will note that all praise its dark and frequently absurdist humour and then slate it for losing it around the half way mark. That would be because it is very biographical and mirrors Bruces's early life, which one can assume was not all fun and jovial. However, for those interested in Bruce Robinson and his work the novel in its entirety is a success, for those who find parts of his life a little dull...is your own that interesting?
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A difficult read and ultimately unsatisfying (review contains some spoilers), 6 Jun 2007
This book was not what I expected and I was really pleased to just finish it.
I suppose that I should have known that the writer behind Withnail And I would not be afraid to shy away from grotesque goings on with bodily substances. However, I was not prepared for the first few chapters to focus on the titular Thomas's penchant for leaving his poo out where people can find it.
Robinson was obviously really taken with this as an initial theme and he explores it lovingly. Admittedly, there are some humorous moments that derive from it. For example, there's a scene where Thomas is caught out in class and on his way to dispose of the evidence (via a number of twists), he ends up putting it in the school cap of another boy (it's funnier than it sounds, mainly because the accurate way with which Robinson portrays the boy's acute embarrassment). In some ways, it's a nasty habit that ties in with one of the themes in the book (namely Thomas's need to bring out into the open things that people don't normally admit) - but that's a very tenuous link and I think that Robinson really does it for shock value.
Shock value is almost certainly behind another focus on pornography and Thomas's attempts to liberate his grandfather's secret stash. Robinson really dwells quite lovingly on the text of a pornographic novel that we're led to believe the Grandfather was writing, which is in sharp contrast to the fact that we're later told that he wrote a legitimate novel that was accepted for publication and regarded as being very good, only to withdraw it on his return from the First World War.
In many ways, the Grandfather is the lynchpin to the story. He is the character around whom Thomas most revolves and there is a really interesting character itching to come out. We are shown that he was a man shaped by horrific injuries received on the Somme (with Robinson using the imagery of maggots and flies to gruesome effect) and who came out a different man. However, Robinson refuses to flesh him out. For example, we know that he appears in pornographic pictures (including one with a woman who has a duck inserted somewhere that could lead to Avian Flu in unusual places), but we don't know why or when. He's a man who's motto is to be kind to others, but whilst we're shown him being kind to Thomas, he does nothing to directly stop the abuse that we learn that Thomas suffers from his father.
The father and mother themselves start off as interesting characters in an interesting situation. There's is a marriage that's clearly on the rocks and I thought that Robinson was very effective in showing a couple in a stasis of passive animosity, which is fractured by the husband's blatant adultery. However, I thought that Robinson rather ruined the effect when he does his Big Reveal of the reason behind it. If Thomas was a more sympathetic character, then it would have resonated more, but he isn't and because the parents aren't either, I found the scene to be unemotionally uninvolving.
I did think that Robinson captured the nature of the friendship and rivalry between Thomas and Maurice very well. I could well believe that these two 16 year olds alternatively confide in and then try to one-up each other and the fact that Maurice, in trying to extricate himself from an embarrassing discovery by his frankly cartoonish vicar father, is the architect of Thomas's final misery is quite believable.
The ending ultimately felt rushed and the open-ended feel of it did not leave me feeling satisfied, although that's also true of the main plot.
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