I'm afraid I don't agree with the positive reviews above. From the pompous subtitle ('A Novel'), the cringemaking dedication and the epigraph that had more than a whiff of the anthology about it, it struck me as being irredeemably pretentious, two-dimensional and - uh-oh - immensely boring. I ended up skim-reading it - because I haven't got the money to buy books and leave them unthumbed on the shelf - and even that didn't stop it irritating me inside-out.
The text was drenched in a ponderous portentousness and was awash with threadbare expressions and devices: a swan so weighed down with significance (see all romance from classical antiquity onwards) I'm surprised it didn't drown in a pool of stagnant allegory long before it was killed by a crossbow bolt; 'playful' meditations on 1970s arcade games (see every edition of FHM since its inception); a hero who 'drinks in' the object of his affection (see the collected works of Dame Barbara Cartland); the Irish girl in the narrator's class at school who had the 'mellifluous' accent (see Frank McCourt/Titanic/Far and Away/Boston on St Patrick's Day/every taxi driver in Dublin); sentimental reminiscences of childhood with no obvious relevance to what there was of a story (see all high-school reunions); things 'nestling' all over the place (see, I dunno, Nestlé)...
The writing style was actually quite good and spare on the whole - albeit very closely modelled on Tom McCarthy's unassuming prose - but for me it was constantly marred by a creeping verbosity and the author's inability to rein in an unnecessary flourish. I didn't find the dialogue pithy or believable and Rourke's use of repetition in places - which I presume he would describe as Beckettian (Beckett's repetition was marked by variation, that's why it worked) - was wholly unsuccessful. Also, in my experience, people who feel they have to introduce or follow every one of their musings with the phrases 'I've always thought' or 'I've often thought' have, conversely, only thought what they say they have always or often thought since they first read it in a book written by someone else or heard it being uttered on TV.
I've got to take issue with that preposterous endorsement on the back cover, too: 'Rourke stakes his claim as heir apparent to greats such as Ballard, Joyce or Houellebecq'. JOYCE? You can't possibly be serious. Houellebecq? On this evidence, I don't think so. (And who, apart from Houellebecq, describes Houellebecq as a great in any case?) Ballard? If he keeps writing until he's 78 and produces a Crash or an Atrocity Exhibition at some point and the odd canny novel thereafter, then maybe. Bit of a tall order though (and I wouldn't loz Ballard in with the greats either).
At the very least, this book needed a half-decent editor to go at it with a pair of secateurs. Some humour (other than unintentional laughs at the book's po-faced self-importance) wouldn't have gone amiss either. Nowhere near as good as some of the reviews here might suggest. One star for eventually killing the swan.
[The critical cliches and the prolixity used in this review were specially chosen by The Reviewer herself.]
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