Richard T. Kelly

This book came so close to being a very good novel, but sadly it fell at the last hurdle. Former soldier David Blaylock, who saw active service in Afghanistan, has gone into politics as a pragmatic Conservative and, against all odds, won and then retained a constituency in Teeside. Shortly thereafter, he is appointed Home Secretary, where he has to balance an increasingly fractious relationship with the police while simultaneously relying upon their unquestioning loyalty as he pursues the war against terror.

There are some clear and utterly plausible insights into the administrative side of the life of a minister, wading through submissions and correspondence while also flitting from meeting to meeting, absorbing his briefing on the way. This was one of the few novels about the political world that I have read that captures that mundane aspect of the ministerial role. Unfortunately, while Kelly captures the context with great clarity, he falls down when it comes to plot. The story develops with tortuous slowness, rendering the novel an exercise in turgidity.… (more)

This review and others like it available on my blog

I'm not entirely sure it works. Oh, plenty of ideas are presented and discussed within the text, but you are frequently hammered with them. And the dread, the melodrama, the creeping horror that should be present in a Gothic Novel simply, well, isn't.

The writing isn't all that great either - often ham-handed, confusing. The characters all sound the same. If you're going to write a novel where you have everal points of view, you should try to make sure that they don't all sound like the same person. I was confused between the characters quite often - even main characters. I would assume I was in the POV of Grey, when I was in fact in Stevens, and vice versa. I could perhaps forgive that if the prose itself wasn't just so bland. The thing is, there is nothing wrong with basic, workmanlike prose that tells you a story simply and plainly. There is a lot wrong with dull, bland prose that seems to think it's poetic and grand.

Once more I'm confined to Blakedene overnight, but this time not the fault of my bad timekeeping, rather because of the cataclysmic weather that befell us late this afternoon.

It's full of this stuff. Pompous, overbearing, dull.

It's a shame because the story itself is dynamite. In other hands it could have been anything from a true, melodramatic Gothic Novel, a tense thriller, or a slow, poetic tragedy, and I would have loved it. But I finished feeling let down by the book. I'm glad I bought it from a charity shop. I only wasted 50p as opposed to the RRP of 12.99.

Ps:

Can we talk a little bit about the sexism? I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be an critical examination of typical 'mild' misogyny or if it was actually a sexist-as-hell book, but as the owner of a uterus I came away feeling really uncomfortable and unpleasant because of the way women were portrayed in the book. It's a subtle feeling and one I'm struggling to examine properly, but there jsut seemed to be this overriding current of women as 'other', as victims, neurotics or destructive forces that I found very distasteful.… (more)