Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Tim Lott, Rumours of a Hurricane, 29 April

It's not the worst book we've read, but I found Rumours of a Hurricane by Tim Lott, supposedly "tragic and hilarious in equal measure" to be cringe-making and unlovable.

A cast of pretty obvious characters have the obvious experiences you'd expect from people going through the upheaval of the Thatcher years. A man buys his council flat, his wife has an affair, his brother is a cowboy builder, he's a printer so of course he's in the Wapping strikes.

There's a couple of moments of reality around racism, but the rest is just clinical, superior to everything, and yet wallowing in the stuff it despises.