Interesting Times

I started a new short story. I was happy with where I reached but had to put it to one side thanks to busy times at work. I was ready to come back to it this past weekend, but my normal equilibrium took a knock from the disaster of the Brexit vote. Such energies as I wanted to expend on writing went into blog posts elsewhere.

Never mind, I thought, I have quite a pile of new and recent novels sitting on my "to read" shelf, and I selected one I thought might be diverting for a day or two.

It is by an author whose work first caught my eye in 2006. Since then I have pre-ordered their work and caught up on their back-catalogue. They've built a decent audience over the last decade and can be regarded, I think, as a successful writer.

Three novels ago, for the first time I abandoned one of their novels. I found it boring: some interesting ideas but, as a story, dull. Well, I thought, lots of people are praising it so I guess it's just one of those things: you can't like everything a writer writes.

Their next book was something of a return to form. I enjoyed it right up until the point, near the end, where the author committed a fairly egregious breach of the fourth wall. This is not unknown in fiction of course, leading the reader to question who the narrator/POV voice really is, causing you to reconsider what you think you're reading. But this was just cack-handed authorial intervention, and I wondered how the editor had let it go by.

And now their most recent novel. I am on page 29 and already thinking of abandoning it. The writing is, in my opinion, poor, with the same authorial interruptions in the narrative and none of the verve or skill in execution that characterised the best of their earlier work.

Is it just me? Lots of people seem to think it is great--they must do: the author repeatedly retweets reader praise for it.

Since I started writing with some degree of seriousness, I have stopped posting reviews of novels on Amazon and have gone to some lengths not to identify the author to whom the above relates. Who it is doesn't really matter. My point is that I suspect if I, as an unknown, were to submit this novel as a manuscript, I would be told, correctly, to go away and not come back until it was a lot better.

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Added: notwithstanding the 5* reviews on Amazon, I couldn't get myself past p.29.