lulzimmujku

Typical early Trevor, which means it's very very different from his mature and late work (which is probably better known and better-loved). It's full of the contrived, stagey and unrealistic dialogue, in a Beckettian or Pinterian vein, that you also see in some of the early stories (e.g. in The Day We Got Drunk on Cake). It's entertaining, and it does work well in some of those short stories, but it can't hold my interest for an entire novel. It was interesting to read this immediately after a failed attempt to read Compton-Burnett's A Father and his Fate, because there's some of the same contrivance in the dialogue: people blatantly saying out loud things one normally doesn't say out loud to one another. I read now that this was his debut, that it immediately won an award which "encouraged Trevor to become a full-time writer", so that was all for the good anyway – whatever the intrinsic merits of the book itself. And it is interesting, and sometimes very funny. No doubt about that.

2022-10-21 05:29