The End of My Tether (A green and black comedy detective story) [Illustrated] (Paperback)

The book could have been sold as Fantasy, but it wasn't. Wasn't even flagged as crime. Publishers seem keen on avoiding genre ghettos these days.

Is it worth reading? Undoubtedly. The writing is light and remains witty as the philosophy comes to the fore. The shallow part of me would have enjoyed the supernatural cop book I started continuing, becoming a series even, but Astley has more to say than that. I will certainly watch out for his next book.

If you haven't, read it. Its only eight quid!

This is a poet's novel, with all the benefits and weaknesses such a term might suggest. The style is suitably enchanting, and there are no shortage of memorable images. One of the novel's strongest chapters, for instance, is a vision of a corporate hell. There are even funny moments, such as the idea of "Hilfiger's Disease," although the novel is not as "wildly funny" as Helen Dunmore says on the cover (but then, she is included in the acknowledgements). But the novel fails to create real characters; with the exception of Kernan, everybody else seems to be caricature, and even Kernan comes across as self-righteous and, frankly, irritating, mostly because of Astley's polemic clumsiness. Similarly, the plot is both sprawling and underfed. At nearly six hundred pages, the novel is far too long, and there's still some way to go before literary play begins to look like throwing ideas around in the hope some will stick in the mind. Yes, the likes of James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges may have opened the five-bar gate to literary experimentalism (and we can go back even further to Laurence Sterne), but in this case postmodernism becomes an excuse for a poorly organised narrative free-for-all. Astley has elsewhere described his novel as a going-over of the English whodunnit form, but without a vestige of the economy of form of that genre.

One of the main problems with the novel is the imbalance between its polemical and fantastic elements. There's nothing wrong, of course, with tugging at the edges of reality, but Astley stretches the novel across two universes; a magical world of folklore, and another more prosaic realm of governmental mismanagement of agricultural affairs. There seems to be little point in making pertinent social commentary on England in the twenty-first century if, on the next page, one's novel seems to be set in a parallel reality. It doesn't help that the polemic is somewhat heavy handed, obviously well researched but delivered with a force which breaks out of the other side of conviction into naivety; describing, for instance, the Foot and Mouth crisis as a 'war' between humans and animals sounds like sixth-form politics. One gets the feeling that Astley will only convince those who already agree with him, while any dissenting readers will become so tired with the rhetoric that they suddenly feel the urge for a good steak. They may also find that the funniest line in the entire novel comes in the acknowledgements, when the author rails against "the debased modern [linguistic] currency of the cliché, slogan, and soundbite," seemingly unaware that most of his characters have been spitting out the same cliches and soundbites, except that these have been lent credence by the passing of time and some kind of folk wisdom - the "people's voice," apparently, and we all know how genuine the prefix "people's" makes things sound.

Nor are the fantastical elements particularly well handled. Although there are some interesting constructions (such as the occasionally divergent narratives), too much whimsy and invention becomes rapidly wearing, and not all of the ideas are as original as they should be. The incursion into other works of literature, for example, seems remarkably stale after Jasper Fforde's founding of a career on the same principle; and while Astley is perhaps the more interesting writer, he needs to develop more original techniques than interpolating himself as author into the novel's resolution. With a greater sense of control, this would have been a powerful conclusion, but over nearly six hundred pages of imaginative gymnastics later, it seems tired.

You may still say I haven't 'got it.' But simply imagining what the result would be if the same material were in the hands of, say, Angela Carter, Peter Ackroyd, or Flann O'Brien (to take but three experimentalists) should demonstrate that literary play shouldn't be as tedious as this is at times. I would certainly be interested in further novels by Astley (and despite the general tenor of this review, there's a lot of promise in the novel), but as long as the literary pyrotechnics are more carefully choreographed than in this first attempt.