You think you get harsh reveiws here on YWO?
Try this from 2000 in The Guardian
Everyone has a book inside them...
Sadly James Thackara's is terrible. Philip Hensher despairs of The Book of Kings * The Observer, Sunday 10 September 2000 22.42 BST
* Article history
The Book of Kings
James Thackara
Duckworth £19.99, pp773
Reviewing someone's first novel, it is customary to be polite about it, to find things to praise in it. So let me say straight away that James Thackara's The Book Of Kings is printed on very nice paper; the typeface is clear and readable, and Samantha Nundy's photograph of the author is in focus. And, given that it's 773 pages long, the author has shown a commendable degree of application and spent a great deal of time on the project.That, as it turns out, is the literary-London story of the book; that he's been writing it for years and years, and was writing the Story of the Twentieth Century. This, we were promised, was going to be the great novel of the European experience, covering continents in its magisterial stride. Now, at last, here it is and we can judge for ourselves.
And it's terrible. Startlingly badly written, with no apparent understanding of what drives people or how people relate or talk to each other, it is a book of gigantic, hopeless awfulness. You read it to a constant, internal muttering of 'Oh - God - Thackara - please, don't - no - oh, God, just listen to this rubbish'. It's so awful, it's not even funny. There is not one decent sentence in the book, nothing but falsity and a useless sincerity. It may be the very worst novel I have ever read.
The scene is Paris in 1932. Thunder clouds are gathering over Europe, but what care our four gay students? They will go and drink and eat and be merry at Polidor's! Ah, Polidor's, where you can buy, er, fish from the jolly old patronne - ' "La-Bas, mes beaux garçons, mes anges; sit down, eat a good dinner!" she shouted, with the discernment of old women for young men.' Meanwhile, things are getting grim in Germany - 'My dear Son,' someone's dear old mum writes. 'Times are hard even in our little village. My old head is full of our new dictator.'
Soon, the time will come for our four students to part. David Sunda, Johannes Godard, Duncan Penn and Justin Lothaire; each comes from a different part of the world. History will treat some of them roughly, of that you may be sure! And some will survive the coming catastrophe, and some, mes braves, will triumph over the savage wavelets of History. (Thackara's style, distressingly, is rather contagious.) And the result is the usual stuff, the tragedy of Germany, the tragedy of Europe, former friends sundered by the movements of History and a book as thick as your wrist.
What sets Thackara apart from other writers in this territory is quite a simple fact. He can't write. After a while, the incredulous reader starts to play a game with this book. The game is to open the book at random and try and find a tolerable sentence.
Save your effort - you will never win. Thackara is always ahead of you, with his uncanny knack for the not-quite-right word and the yer-what turn of phrase. 'You could not see his parents' intricate cultivation, nor that the ball was in the Palazzo Farnese, just after the war.' 'Justin's friend was not in the courtyard, but the fountain was.' 'The Hanoverian battery commander, Egbert, was as delighted as a music conductor to show off for his guests behind the embankment wall.' 'Yet presently David was descending behind his parents' guests round the great staircase into the bright halls of white-tied gentlemen and crop haired ladies in clinging lace, with their cigarette stems and sashes.' These examples are taken entirely at random. It is all at least as bad as this, and some of it is worse to an unspeakable degree.
Terrible as Thackara's prose is, it becomes quite unremarkable when set next to his idea of dialogue. It is the purest Hollywood mini-series idea of how foreigners talk to each other, a sort of language never spoken by man or woman. 'David... what about kindness and children, what about right and wrong? Also love. What about love?' 'Isn't the power and its refinement here?' 'The struggle there, Eli, is for the soil of my fathers.' 'All this will seem insignificant afterward. You and I must concentrate on Karin's beautiful wedding... you look so handsome and well-rested.' You keep suspecting that the characters aren't listening to each other and are prepared to say anything at all.
The truth is that it's Thackara who is just incapable of listening. Every single character talks in exactly the same idiotically macaronic way, and five hundred pages into it, you are still trying to remember which humourless pundit is which. The women sound like the men. The men sound like nothing on earth. And not one of them has a single thing to say other than how the Tragedy of History is progressing.
The awful thing is that Thackara really wants to say something. He is utterly sincere and will probably be admired by people who believe that sincerity, rather than art, is the basis of a great novel. He is probably a nice man. He obviously cares deeply about these great historical movements and has done a great deal of research - my God, he has researched and researched and researched. But on the evidence of The Book of Kings, he could not write 'Bum' on a wall.
Here's the original
"A,B&E", "Not In My Name" and "52FF" (flash fiction anthology) all available
on Amazon Kindle"How a psychopath makes sweet love. I can get you ringside. Royal box even."
professional review
17 May 2011, 11:04
