Aug 2019
10:57am, 28 Aug 2019
40,919 posts
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McGoohan
Bob and Terry, the Likely Lads have grown older but no wiser. Bob has settled down and married Thelma his long-term girlfriend, but Terry is still playing the field.
Read on with this continuation of the story... Whatever Happened When We Came To The End. Or something.
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Sep 2019
11:14am, 11 Sep 2019
41,119 posts
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McGoohan
We read, we the Book Group. We read Joshua Ferris' novel, Then We Came To The End which is notable for being written in the first person plural. Some of us welcomed this, some were suspcious, others indifferent.
McGoohan was one of the readers who picked up the Ferris book with trepidation. Some of us recalled an earlier Book Group choice, The Virgin Suicides which was also written in the first person plural. McGoohan for one found this a very distancing technique. 'Who the hell is even talking here?' he demanded. One of the things we note in passing about literary fiction is that it is often also written in the present tense, like this rather odd sentence. What is it with these writers, some of us say, can't they remember stuff? Thankfully, we noted slipping comfortably back into the past tense, Ferris doesn't often do that.
Then we came to the poll and we were surprised to see that of the 14 votes so far, all 14 have voted for 'killing the x'. We were the first to look upon this poll with an opinion. An honest to gosh opinion. One of us, McGoohan, paused the mouse on the screen unable either to vote or to continue writing in the first person plural.
Exhausted, he gave up and went for a coffee.
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Sep 2019
11:54am, 11 Sep 2019
15,174 posts
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Chrisull
I read this a while back, I quite liked it once you got over the tricksy narrative style. I didn't like the dentist one as much, but here the humour resonated, it's hard to read a novel as "an escape" only to be catapulted back into the kind of petty office politics world you are trying to escape from. But yeah it was occasionally funny, bit like Douglas Coupland in places, and mildly forgettable. I've certainly read a lot worse.
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Sep 2019
12:34pm, 11 Sep 2019
40,108 posts
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Diogenes
"I've certainly read a lot worse" is a great quote for a cover. I shall appropriate this for when I publish.
I read the dentist one and quite enjoyed it. I've not managed to get my hands on this one yet.
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Sep 2019
2:35pm, 11 Sep 2019
41,134 posts
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McGoohan
Okay, proper review time. As you might gather, I found this really difficult to get into. The whole 'we' thing is so artificial and it's very hard to get an angle on any of the individual characters as a result.
The humour. Hmm. Well, it's what I would call 'wry'. Well-observed, witty, that sort of thing but I never felt like laughing out loud. It occurred to me that the same ground has been covered to greater comic effect in The Office (UK and US editions).
And for a while the supposed universality of it was annoying. It mostly just heightened the difference between a US workplace and a UK one.
Eventually it clicked with me: some petty politics at work seemed to match the goings-on in the book. Then there was the section on Lynn Mason and her breast cancer. Not written in the first person plural: she is the boss so is not part of the 'we'.
It all goes a bit leftfield but highly readable when you get the disgruntled employee back in clown makeup and apparently armed for a slaughter.
One of the most effective parts I thought was the end, where you have various people at a reunion and one person is begging people to stay, but the group has permanently fractured. That felt very real.
It's odd really. I thought I was going to hate it at first but it's the very definition of a 'grower'. I've given it a 7 in the poll but might have even been persuaded to go higher.
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Sep 2019
2:45pm, 11 Sep 2019
15,186 posts
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Chrisull
I hate it, I hate it, I hate quite like it, I love it.
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Sep 2019
2:53pm, 11 Sep 2019
41,136 posts
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McGoohan
Yes! That would have saved me a lot of typing.
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Sep 2019
1:32pm, 23 Sep 2019
14,130 posts
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Serendippily
I really enjoyed it. The plural pronouns were a conceit I found engaging, I didn’t mind the swap to Lynns story and if the last quarter were less convincing than the start I was prepared to forgive it for capturing an attitude to work I remember from 80s and 90s cubicle life. I wouldn’t say it was accurate. But it was familiar. The 3.15 time and the shuffling in a meeting when no one has a solution or find the prep. The horror over the serial number chair. I would forgive a lot in a book for those moments
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Sep 2019
1:34pm, 23 Sep 2019
14,131 posts
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Serendippily
*done* the prep
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Sep 2019
9:35pm, 23 Sep 2019
18,477 posts
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Columba
I really, really liked this book.
When the narrative suddenly switched from first-person-plural to third-person-singular I was not very happy. But of course, we discover why, towards the end; Hank wrote the 3rd-person singular bit as his successful novel. Not only did the change of voice make sense, but the fact that it didn't entirely correspond to the truth (was Mark even real? No, Hank had invented him).
I may say, I liked Joe Pope from the beginning, although "we" clearly didn't like him at first. And the fact that, at the end, no-one knows what has become of him seemed to me entirely appropriate.
The ending did seem a bit saccharine-sweet, though, with things turning out good for nearly all the characters, and all of them loving one another. But the final sentence is a gem.
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