Jack-Cade

I really loved this when I was a teenager - it's pretty unusual to get learned, philosophical slapstick humour in a book. Now I'm older though, I find it a bit light. Just changing tastes, I guess.

**maybe spoilers**

I can't help but feel I've read a different book to those of you who speak of 'audacious sleights of plotting' and that prattling critic on the back who talks of a plot that is 'garish, crude, infernally clever' - I thought it was all fairly straightforward. There's an element of mystery throughout, yes, because there are important details Gold doesn't let us in on, but once someone explains, it all fits in neatly - far too neatly, I think.

And twists? I can only think of one genuine twist, and that was the revelation that Phoebe is the girl who supposedly 'died'. It was hugely improbable and pointless.

Anything else that might have turned out to be a twist was hinted at unsubtly for far too long. We know Mysterioso, now some kind of unstable killer, is coming back for a showdown with Carter. We know Carter's pulled some kind of switcheroo with the TV plans. We know he's going to get it on with Phoebe etc.

That all said, it was a really well written and entertaining read for the first two thirds at least, and I especially appreciated the inclusion of the Marx Brothers (even though it's rather unlikely that Groucho would assume his on-screen persona at every given moment of the day).

Even the last third is engaging and fun, even if it becomes grotesquely Disneyesque. I don't think I've ever read a novel which takes such great pains to be seem emotionally and historically plausible, only to throw in a one-dimensional villain and a 'happily ever after' at the end.

So, certainly, I'd say, easy to rip through, full of charm and neatly drawn characters, of especial interest for its fragments of history, but ultimately could have been much better.

I've read Massie's 'Caligula' before, and I much admire him for not giving in, as Robert Graves did in 'I, Claudius', to the temptation to use all the least likely but most shocking aspects of Roman historical accounts in his reconstruction.

'Augustus' is also a lot more readable than 'I, Claudius' and is full of very convincing wisdom, especially in the first half of the book, which Augustus is supposedly writing for his grandsons Gaius and Lucius. It's also great to see Roman sexual excess treated as something complex, with a political dimension, rather than degraded and pointless.

I've read various Roman histories, and love the BBC 'I, Claudius', and read the original Roman sources (well, Suetonius and Tacitus) and I can definitely say that Massie has come up with my favourite account in writing - balanced, realistic, but shocking, intriguing, and with the dialects nicely updated, so, for instance, Marcus Agrippa, who has the heart of a soldier and an everyman, speaks more like a typical pub-dwelling bloke, while Mycaenas is recognisably a super-camp luvvie.

It's not like the only two alternative portrayals of Africa are as a gun runners' paradise and a friendly, jolly little place. Objecting to the former isn't an argument in favour of the latter.

On a sidenote, I can't stand it when people talk about 'empowered' or 'empowering' women in books. The phrase in itself seems utterly condescending, like women - even fictional women - require someone to gift them powers in order to prove their worth. In terms of interesting, sympathetic characters, I'd rather read about a relatively weak or flawed woman who shows courage and ingenuity within the constraints of her power.

I'm not sure if anything written about death isn't made to appear more poignant and affecting after the event of an actual death. I've only been to one funeral in the last few years - a friend's - and they read out some typically bad, cliche-soaked poetry in honour of the fact that he liked poetry and had a literature degree. I couldn't help thinking he'd have wished for some better quality stuff.

Haven't read the book, but gotta say that I think Avocatore's last comment rather spectacularly puts the phrase 'life-affirming' in its proper context!

OK, this is my favourite Mitchell book so far. It is, however, slightly spoilt for me by how much of a straight rip-off it seems to be. I noticed fairly early on the Murakami parallels, even though I've only ever read three chapters of Murakami ('Norwegian Wood' is named after a Beatles song and the protagonist loves the Beatles, while 'number9dream' is named after a John Lennon song and the protagonist loves John Lennon. I don't like it when books are named after songs I *like*, let alone hideously overrated ones by hideously overrated artists.)

Stuff I've read since has more or less convinced me that 'number9dream' can be generously described as a homage.

The writing, as usual for Mitchell, was mostly superbly skilful, verging on poetry at points. It didn't have anywhere near as many clunky parts as 'Black Swan Green' and there was none of the stifling verbosity of the early parts of 'Cloud Atlas'. It does have, however, at least one sequence which feels 'dumped in' rather carelessly - a series of children's stories Eiji reads that don't have (or I couldn't find) any real relevance to the plot or characters. The submarine diary part was much much better, but Mitchell gives in to his playfulness at the end and it goes silly. I find it hard to accept that a man whose mission - nay, his sole purpose in life - has resulted in complete failure, and who is dying of aesphyxiation in a small, hot, metal space, and who has broken his nose and torn his fingernails, would sit and write:

"Wild spinning - up=down, down=up...Lurching downwards > hung downwards > judder halt... Kaiten glanced off hull = bamboo spear off metal helmet..."

Then the lyrics to a song.

The second part is also slightly confusing. I settled nicely into the rhythm of fantasy, reality, fantasy in part 1, and thought that worked brilliantly, but I got severely lost in the cuts between past and present in part 2. I'm still not sure which cat died and at what point.

I don't think I'm being harsh at all, but then, I'm weighing my opinion against someone who disliked it so much he shouted, "It's balls!" in the pub, repeatedly, louder and louder, until a bouncer came over and told him to keep it down.

I don't think Jason being a trainee writer is an excuse for clunkily written bits. If the intention was as you say, they should come across as parts that are awkwardly thought out by Jason and well written by Mitchell. They don't. They just look badly written by Mitchell. After all, we could all write a book that is badly written, but 'frame' it as the writing of an awkward protagonist.

I'm not sure about Mitchell overall. I've read three of his books so far, and enjoyed them - Number9Dream being my favourite - but the degree to which he appropriates other voices and just stacks them up means I find it difficult to really feel any enthusiasm for him as a writer. I admire his skill, but my emotional reaction doesn't go far beyond that.

My travelling companion was reading this throughout our month-long jaunt through East Africa. I noticed one of the awful review quotes on the back said something like, "The book is filled not with characters, but with *people*." This set me against the book and I repeatedly took the piss out of my friend for reading it. He countered with, "No, it's pretty good." "Plenty f intrigue." "The characters are well drawn out." "It's quite an epic."

Some time in the last few months, I was reminded of the book, and said to my friend, who was present at the time, "Hey, you read that didn't you? When we were in Africa? You read the whole thing."

"Yeah," he said. "God, it was awful."

Bizarrely, this is one of the only Terry Pratchett books that I still really like. The Discworld books were fun when I was a teenager but as I got older, the jokes seemed to get very laboured, the plots meandering and the satire obvious.

I think 'Truckers' and its sequels, however, stand up as clever, inventive fantasy in their own right, rather than a soft parody of the genre. Plus, Masklin and Grimma are genuinely cool characters - resourceful, intelligent and out of their depth - rather than the loveable, bumbling nitwits Pratchett usually employs for his books.