Hatchet Job An old review I’ve just rediscovere…
Hatchet Job
An old review I’ve just rediscovered - dear me, I seem to have been a little angry…
Reading this book reminded why I rarely read novels these days - because most of them are godawful rubbish. Read the plaudits that spill over several pages at the beginning of John Preston�s second novel and you�d think he�d come up with a minor masterpiece. Instead Ink is a turgid farce set in the pre-Murdoch Fleet Street days that considers itself to be a black comedy. If several recurring weak jokes and the description of a couple of deaths constitutes a black comedy, fair enough, but otherwise, one wonders if Mr Preston enlisted his former Fleet Street chums to write good reviews of his novel without actually reading it.
Ink sports possibly the most ineffectual lead character ever (tellingly called Hugh) and his quest to discover the identity of a dead man dragged from the Thames has little in the way of pace, plot, character development or narrative twist, let alone anything genuinely approaching black humour. Instead it labours under the misapprehension that possessing a protagonist who apoligises for everything in the most cliched example of middle class angst somehow passes for being funny. Ben Elton has a lot to answer for. Ink sadly isn�t one of those books that you forget as soon as you finish it - it�s so bad it lingers like a bad fart in the memory, and the only useful function reading it can fulfill is to warn others not to bother.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- File under: Journalists who don�t understand literature, vol 94
- Black Flag Henry Rollins releases "Smile, You’r…
- Black Hawk (and knickers) Down On the BBC�s New…
- Whatever Happened To….Robert Mcliam Wilson?
- Look Back With Contempt
