William Boyd's Restless (Bloomsbury, 2006), the 2012 BBC TV Adaptation, and Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth (Jonathan Cape, 2012)

Enough with the procrastinatory obfuscation; time to get back into blogging proper, with a 2006 historical espionage novel I was inspired to read last autumn as a result of reading a 2012 historical espionage novel:

Restless by William Boyd, published by Bloomsbury in hardback in the UK in 2006, and bought in first edition by me in Bookworms in Shoreham last summer. Now, my original plan, when I read Restless, had been to read Boyd's most recent novel, Waiting for Sunrise, which was published by Bloomsbury in June of 2012, and which I showcased in signed first in August. But then I went and bought a signed first of this:

Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth, published by Jonathan Cape not long after Waiting for Sunrise, and dove into that instead. Unfortunately it proved to be a disappointment – at least for me – both as a spy story and as a novel: Serena, the narrator, is a pretty rubbish secret agent, not to mention a rather dreary sort altogether, and though the final reveal does offer an explanation for that, it was all a little too tricksy and self-satisfied for my liking, and ultimately pointless, even given the meta trappings (which are undermined by the presumed complicity of Serena anyway). So, having enjoyed William Boyd's 2009 thriller Ordinary Thunderstorms, and knowing that Restless was, like Sweet Tooth, ostensibly a historical spy novel, I figured I'd give that a go, reasoning that it might act as a kind of palate cleanser (I know: bit weird, but that's how my mind works). And I'm glad I did, because not only did it turn out to be a cracking read – so much so that it ended up in my top ten books I read in 2012 chart – but a few months later, at the end of December, the BBC broadcast a two-part television drama based on the novel, adapted by Boyd himself.

And a pretty good fist he made of it as well, as did director Edward Hall and stars Hayley Atwell – playing Russian-born British World War II spy Eva Delectorskaya – and Rufus Sewell as Eva's handler, Lucas Romer. There's some stilted dialogue, especially early on, but once it gets going the TV Restless does a terrific job translating the subterfuge and set pieces of the novel, notably one exciting sequence where Eva is dispatched by Romer to Holland to witness the supposed defection of a German agent (an episode Boyd based on the real-life Venlo Incident).

Where the adaptation falls down slightly is in its treatment of Eva's daughter, Ruth Gilmartin. The novel alternates between Eva's WWII adventures, which are written in the third person, and Ruth's first-person recollection of the long hot summer of 1976, when her mother revealed to her that she was a spy during the war. Boyd spends quite a bit of time establishing Ruth's character and fleshing out her life: her friendly and amusing relationship with her professor at Cambridge and with the students to whom she teaches English (one of whom becomes infatuated by her); her fraught relationship with her estranged German lover (and his brother), the father of her child. In the adaptation, however, much of this excised – probably to keep the running time down to three hours, which I guess is fair enough (although why Ruth's professor becomes German in the TV version is beyond me); except that as a consequence, the strong, willful, warm Ruth of the novel is reduced to little more than a way of keeping the plot moving.

Still, if you haven't seen the television Restless, don't let that put you off: it has much to recommend it... just not quite as much as the book is all.

The Existential Ennui Review of the Year in Books and Comics: The Ten Best Books I Read in 2012

And so, suitably stuffed with turkey and sausages and Christmas pudding and the entire contents of a confectionery selection pack – and consequently suffering with the meat 'n' fruit 'n' chocolate sweats – we reach the final post in the three-part Existential Ennui Review of the Year in Books and Comics – and indeed the final post for the year. And having presented a big long list of the sixty-four books I read this year – a list which, as usual, largely comprised books published well before 2012 (over sixty years before in some cases), and which, incidentally, this year was linked by both The Rap Sheet and The Comics Reporter – it's time to pick my ten favourites from that list.

I've elected to exclude any rereads, for the simple reason that if I hadn't, a third of the top ten would have been taken up by Patricia Highsmith Ripley novels, and I've endeavoured to restrict myself to just one appearance per author – although achieving that wasn't as hard as you might imagine: the only real candidates for two appearances were Donald E. Westlake with his Tucker Coe novel Murder Among Children, and Elmore Leonard with Mr. Majestyk. But there were other books besides those that could have quite easily made the cut in a less competitive year: John D. MacDonald's debut Travis McGee mystery The Deep Blue Goodbye; Anthony Price's fine espionage novel Other Paths to Glory; Brian Garfield's Death Wish; William Goldman's Marathon Man; P. M. Hubbard's A Thirsty Evil; and from 2012 itself, George Pelecanos's stylish '70s crime spree What it Was and Jeremy Duns's third Paul Dark spy thriller, The Moscow Option. And were I to expand the top ten to a top twenty, well: there's numbers eleven to nineteen right there.

As it is, I've cheated anyway: I couldn't separate the two books vying for the number ten spot, so I've made them equal tenth. If you have a problem with that, you could perhaps take a moment to consider that a) the top ten is drawn from a list of books which were published across seven decades, which makes it a fairly meaningless selection anyway (although arguably no more meaningless than other, more traditional "best of the year" lists); and b) it's my blog and ultimately I'll do what the bloody hell I like. So ner.

In ascending order, then, with links to whatever I wrote about them this year, here are the ten (ish) best books I read in 2012. Happy new year.

=10. Restless by William Boyd (2006)
The Human Factor by Graham Greene (1978)
I read a number of books this year over which Kim Philby cast his long shadow – including his autobiography – but these two were the best. Graham Greene's sad and moving portrait of a man who betrays his country for love clearly isn't, as Greene himself was at pains to point out, a roman a clef, but it's hard not to detect traces of Greene's old friend Philby in Maurice Castle's actions, if not his motivations and character. As for Restless, I read that one right after reading Ian McEwan's disappointing Sweet Tooth, in the hope that it would prove a more satisfying spy novel. In the event, it was a more satisfying novel overall, something I'll be exploring in a post in the new year in which I'll be comparing it to its recent BBC TV adaptation.

9. The Big Bounce by Elmore Leonard (1969)
Elmore Leonard's debut crime novel, this meandering, surprising story, peopled with believable yet still idiosyncratic characters and peppered with choice dialogue, set the template for what was to come.

8. The Lovely Horrible Stuff by Eddie Campbell (2012)
I've loved Eddie Campbell's comics since I first came across them in the 1980s; to my mind he's one of the most important creators ever to work in the medium, and The Lovely Horrible Stuff is as good as anything he's done: an extended meditation on the pernicious influence of filthy lucre, drawing on the history of the Pacific island of Yap as well as some very personal, not to mention raw, episodes.

7. A Rough Shoot by Geoffrey Household (1951)
Fast-paced, light, thrilling, a joy to read. Plus: badger ham. Yes: badger ham.

6. This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith (1960)
One of Highsmith's most powerful novels: an intense study of the mad impulses and justifications behind stalking.

5. Commander-1 by Peter George (1965)
An overlooked post-apocalyptic gem, as good as, if not better than, On the Beach and Alas, Babylon. I urge you to seek it out.

4. 361 by Donald E. Westlake (1962)
Westlake's third novel under his own name, and his first crime fiction masterpiece.

3. The Twelve by Justin Cronin (2012)
Beautifully written, epic in scope, and probably the most gripping novel I read all year.

2. Game Without Rules by Michael Gilbert (1968)
Eleven short stories starring devious middle-aged intelligence operatives Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens. Sublime.

1. Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn (1967)
I stated back in May that Towards the End of the Morning was the best book I'd read so far this year, and as 2012 draws to a close, it still is. Follow the links to find out why.

Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd (Bloomsbury, 2012): Signed First Edition, plus Boyd and Bond

From a signed political memoir sent to me as a gift by my friend and fellow blogger Book Glutton, next in this series of posts on signed editions, a book which may well be of interest to Book Glutton, by an author who's currently writing a Bond novel...

This is the British first edition/first impression of William Boyd's Waiting for Sunrise, published by Bloomsbury earlier this year. Boyd's eleventh novel, the reason this particular copy might be of interest to Book Glutton is because BG is a big fan of Boyd's work, and so he'll hopefully appreciate this:

The author's signature on the title page. I bought this copy on publication from Firsts in Print, but I must admit I haven't yet read it – in fact I've still only read one William Boyd novel: his 2009 thriller Ordinary Thunderstorms, which I liked a lot. I did, however, find a cheap first of his 2006 spy novel Restless in Bookworms in Shoreham the other week, so I'm more likely to try that ahead of Waiting for Sunrise, even though the latter does apparently feature elements of espionage. (Book Glutton, if you're reading this, and if you've read Waiting for Sunrise, do please share your thoughts on it in the comments.)

Speaking of espionage, in April of this year William Boyd was announced as the writer of the next official James Bond novel, following in the footsteps of Sebastian Faulks and Jeffery Deaver. Book Glutton expressed his disappointment at the news in this post, reasoning that Boyd writing a new Bond novel meant that he wouldn't be writing a new Boyd novel, but I'm actually cautiously optimistic, as Boyd's Bond book, unlike Deaver's (Carte Blanche, 2011, which I didn't get on with at all), will be period, i.e. set in 1969, which would place it just post-Colonel Sun, Kingsley Amis's rather good 1968 pseudonymous contribution to the Bond literary canon. Even more promisingly, Boyd cites perhaps the best of Ian Fleming's original novels, From Russia, with Love, as his favourite Bond novel. Given that Ian Fleming Publications seem intent on adding to the literary Bond's adventures, Boyd strikes me as an interesting choice to pen a Bond novel, particularly one that's set to be published in 2013, the sixtieth anniversary of Bond's debut in Casino Royale.

And of course before that, there's this:

Anyway, enough of all this Bonding. There'll be more signed editions soon, many of them by authors who are firm favourites here on Existential Ennui. Ahead of those, though: a Westlake Score-and-review...

2010: A Review of the Year in Books and Comics; 6. The 10 Best Books I Read This Year

Final post of the year, and what better way to round off 2010 than with a Top 10 Chart of the Best Books I Read This Year. As with almost all of these year-end posts I've been doing, however, and as the Bloody Great List of the books I read in 2010 – from whence this Top 10 is culled – demonstrated, few of the books I ploughed through over the past twelve months were particularly new. Consequently, this chart, which amongst its entries boasts just two books published in 2010, is utterly arbitrary and ultimately useless in gauging anything about the year just ended other than my reading habits. Then again, ain't that Existential Ennui all over?

Getting the list down to ten was a struggle. I initially assembled a Top 20, but while there were certainly some good books in the lower orders of that longer chart, they weren't quite as outstanding as the ones further up the list, and so made the whole thing seem slightly pedestrian. But once I'd determined to prune it, deciding what to keep and what to lose became increasingly difficult. I was stuck at thirteen for a while, then twelve, and then really dithered at eleven. Honourable mentions must therefore go to Belinda Bauer's Blacklands, to fine efforts by Gavin Lyall and Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos, to Dan Clowes's Wilson and Darwyn Cooke's Parker: The Outfit, and to more than a few Richard Stark novels, including The Man with the Getaway Face, The Score and especially The Split.

Anyway, here's the Top 10. I've reviewed a lot of these books before, so in those cases I've kept further comments to a minimum and provided a link back to the original review, should you wish to read my ramblings. All that's left to do before we get stuck in is to wish you a merry new year, and see you in the alarmingly science fiction-sounding 2011.

10. Bank Shot by Donald E. Westlake
This being a Top 10, I've had to limit my Westlake selections to one novel written under his real name and one written as Richard Stark. This own-brand excursion is the second in his comedic series starring luckless thief John Dortmunder; it's a charming, breezy affair that culminates in an increasingly ridiculous – in a good way – bit of business centring on efforts to hide a mobile bank. Go here for a longer review.

9. Ending Up by Kingsley Amis
A brilliant novel about the bitterness of old age which I had ruined for me when I happened to listen to part of a talk by Amis's most recent biographer Zachary Leader in which Leader divulges the ending of the book. Bastard. But I did discover that Amis made eight pages of notes for the novel, beginning with a list of forty-five ways of being annoying. Hopefully one of those simply states, "Zachary Leader". There's no plot to speak of, merely a sequence of short chapters detailing the minor slights, petty squabbles and general intolerance betwixt a cast of old folk living out their latter years in a country cottage. That ending, by the way, is a supreme act of character vandalism.

8. The ACME Novelty Library #20: Lint by Chris Ware
I think I said pretty much all I had to say about this one in this review. A remarkable graphic novel.

7. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
Not much more to add to this one either.

6. Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd
Or indeed this.

5. The Passage by Justin Cronin
Easily the most epic novel I read this year, The Passage is a brilliantly realised piece of horror fantasy. The descriptive passages may be a bit flowery in places, but the force of the narrative is undeniable, and Cronin's attempts to offer a scientific explanation for vampirism lends the story a certain plausibility. Partial review here.

4. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household
Review here.

3. Chinaman's Chance by Ross Thomas
Review here.

2. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre
I'm still planning on posting something on le Carre's Karla Trilogy once I've read the third book, Smiley's People. But I'll be astonished if that novel manages to top this bruised, elegiac, reflective, mournful masterpiece.

1. Point Blank (The Hunter) by Richard Stark
Donald Westlake's first novel under the Stark moniker may not be as elegantly written or exquisitely layered as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, nor its characterization and dialogue as beautifully crafted as that of Chinaman's Chance. But in terms of its importance, both to my reading this year, and to fiction in general, it can't be beat. The blunt, stripped back prose style; the cunning formal complexity; the depiction of an illegal, underground, yet strangely professional America where men steal to finance their individual versions of the American Dream: these are just some of the things that make it special. And at its heart, the thief among thieves: Parker, that weird, taciturn, detached yet utterly compelling creation. Simply the best.

Go here for the 2010 Review of the Year in Books and Comics, Part 1

Go here for the 2010 Review of the Year in Book and Comics, Part 2

Go here for the 2010 Review of the Year in Books and Comics, Part 3 

Go here for the 2010 Review of the Year in Books and Comics, Part 4

Go here for the 2010 Review of the Year in Books and Comics, Part 5

Going Underground: Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, Concrete Island by J. G. Ballard, and Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd

Before we get to the promised cavalcade of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake Scores, I thought I'd take a slight detour to chew over some recent non-Westlake reads (yes, I do read other books). Quite by chance, I've read three books in quick succession over the past few weeks where the main protagonist finds himself cast away or trapped in a small patch of land. Two of the books are actually very similar in their choice of urban location, while the third is more rural, but still bears a remarkable similarity to the others.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household was the first of this triumvirate I read, and the most rural. Originally published in 1939, it's the first-person account of an unnamed British man (who, though nameless, hints throughout that he is a Lord, and well-recognised in England), his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate a European dictator, and his subsequent escape into the English countryside, all the while pursued by agents of the dictator. There's an extended sequence in the novel where our hero digs himself a burrow in the Dorset moors, and it's this section that's the most compelling and bears the most resemblance to the other two books, as he gradually loses all trace of his previously civilized nature and sinks into a filthy, degraded, but also strangely alluring existence.

Alluring, because it's at this point that he seems most free, and most happy, despite the squalor he's living in. Reduced to merely surviving, any and all problems melt away in the face of more immediate concerns: finding food, keeping warm. It's an extremely simplified way of life, but one our hero almost revels in, particularly when he is granted the occasional company of a grumpy, feral cat.

It's this acceptance of, and in turn embracing of, a downgraded existence that I was reminded of when I was reading the second book, William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009). Here, a young man called Adam Kindred is being hunted for a murder he didn't commit, so, much like Household's character, he removes himself from society and in this case goes underground in London. Again, as he divests himself of the trappings of civilization – he can't use his credit cards or contact anyone lest he be tracked – he finds a kind of peace in a triangle of overgrown wasteland near Chelsea Bridge, with a camping stove to heat his tins of beans and three old tyres fashioned into a chair.

Even when he's forced to leave this patch of ground and starts to slowly rejoin society, Kindred feels the occasional pang for his lost parcel of land, much as Rogue Male's protagonist is reluctant to leave his lair. And once again, this is probably the most vivid part of the novel, enjoyable though the subsequent chapters are. Like Household, Boyd, through Kindred, seems to be yearning for a simpler way of life, one where a small triangle of land can offer more fulfillment than a wider life of conspicuous consumption – even if it does mean having to snack on the occasional seagull.

Of course, the protagonist in the third novel of our triumvirate has even less choice in the matter than either Kindred or Lord No-Name: in J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island (1973), an architect named Robert Maitland crashes through a barrier on London's Westway onto another triangle of wasteland, and becomes trapped. His injuries prevent him from escaping, and in any case no one will stop to help him. I'm only a third of the way through the book at the moment, so I don't know if Maitland will come to embrace his new existence, but it's still striking that both Maitland and Kindred wind up in triangles of land in west London, only a couple of miles apart.

It's too early to pass judgment on Concrete Island yet, but the other two novels are both fine works. Household has a clipped style befitting his ennobled narrator, while Boyd's early tendency to pepper his prose with off-piste words – a boscy here, a ratiocination there – settles down once the narrative starts to gain momentum. But both books paint compelling portraits of individuals cast adrift from mainstream society, and, possibly with Concrete Island (we shall see...), show that going underground needn't necessarily be such a bad thing. Seagull snacking aside.

Kingsley Amis and the Thrill of the Thriller

That post yesterday about William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms got me thinking about literary authors who try their hands at genre fiction, and how the results are viewed. Thing is, there's no getting round the fact that, in literary circles, genre fiction is generally considered an inferior beast to 'proper' novels, that is yer Booker Prize shortlist-type affairs. So whenever a literary writer stoops to reside a while in the rambling, well-worn, many-roomed mansion that is genre fiction, it's big news.

Sebastian Faulks waggled a toe in the genre pool (hey, the mansion has a pool!) with his James Bond effort Devil May Care, and Boyd has done so with his book. Both generated headlines and commentary aplenty. I haven't read either yet (although I have both to read), but while the critical reception of Ordinary Thunderstorms was generally positive (if often qualified), the response to Devil May Care suggested that even Faulks himself felt rather above the whole thing. There's certainly precedent for that, if it is the case: as Book Glutton points out in his thoughtful response to that Boyd post, Grahame Greene for a long time divided his own novels into two camps – serious literary efforts, and 'entertainments'.

I don't think thrillers, crime fiction and so on really need defending, either from critics or from authors themselves: if a writer writes well, understands plot, character, structure, pacing, it shouldn't – doesn't – matter if a book happens to tumble into a genre. Anyone with half a brain can see the pared back brilliance of Richard Stark's prose (and the likes of John Banville have said as much). But there are still plenty of literary types who see these kinds of books as anathema: witness the furore prompted by Stephen King being awarded the 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award at the US National Book Awards (former CEO of Simon & Schuster Richard Snyder proclaimed King's work "non-literature").

All of which reminded me of an interview I read recently with Martin Amis, which dealt in part with a literary figure who practically wallowed in genre fiction: his father, Kingsley Amis. In that interview (which of course I can't bloody find now, but anyway), Amis mentioned that his father tended to read for pleasure. Which made me think, as opposed to what? Reading for displeasure? What Amis was getting at, I suppose, was the argument that fiction shouldn't be easy, that it should challenge, confront, perhaps change. And perhaps it should. But shouldn't it also, ultimately, be readable – that is, pleasurable?

Amis went on to say that Kingsley put more stock in the poetry he wrote (Amis Sr., that is), viewing the novel as an inferior form. Amis Jr. would be best placed to know that, I guess, but it strikes me as slightly disingenuous. For one, Amis Sr. wrote a lot of novels. If he thought so little of the form, isn't it odd that he spent so much time embracing it? For another, Amis took a great pleasure in the sort of fiction that Amis Jr. would sneer at: thrillers, spy fiction, science fiction. Kingsley loved Ian Fleming's Bond novels, the thrillers of Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household and Gavin Lyall. He wrote reviews of and essays on SF and genre fiction; there's an entire book of his writings on SF – New Maps of Hell (1960) – and on the Bond novels – The James Bond Dossier (1965). He even wrote letters to the authors he admired; Peter O'Donnell's proudest moment of his career was a letter he received from Kingsley noting how much Amis liked O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise books. (You can read the letter here; note Amis admits this was the second time he'd read the books – all thirteen of them.)

Amis Sr. also wrote his own versions of these types of books: The Anti-Death League (1966), a military espionage novel (amongst other things); The Green Man (1969), a ghost story; The Riverside Villas Murder (1973), his take on an Agatha Christie whodunnit; The Alteration (1976) and Russian Hide and Seek (1980), both speculative fiction. And famously, or perhaps infamously from Martin's perspective, Kingsley wrote a Bond novel himself, 1968's Colonel Sun, under the nom de plume Robert Markham. All that novel-writing, all that reading, all those essays, all those fan letters: seems an awful lot of time, effort and energy expended on something that, according to Martin, Kingsley viewed as somehow inferior.

By saying Amis thought less of the novel than he did poetry, what I think Martin is actually doing is making excuses for his pater's predilection for 'low' fiction, for the genre novels that Kingsley enjoyed and occasionally tried his own hand at. You get the sense that Kingsley's appreciation of thrillers, SF and the like, offends Martin. I don't know if that's true or not, but Kingsley's passion for genre fiction and belief in its worth is plain to see in his own writings on the subject. Conversely, it is notable that, by the sounds of it, Kingsley tended to steer away from the sorts of novels his son writes. (Amis Jr. mentions in the interview that when Kingsley got to the part in Money where Martin himself appears as a character in the novel, he chucked the book across the room.)

In the end, I guess it all comes down to personal preference: whether you read to challenge or better yourself, or whether you read for enjoyment. Of course, there's no reason not to do both. But equally, the one shouldn't preclude the other. I've read Martin Amis and I've read Kingsley Amis. And I know which I prefer. *

(* Kingsley, obv.)

(For further thoughts on Kingsley Amis and genre works, head here for an essay by me and here for a guest post by critic Michael Barber.)

New Arrival: Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd

There's a tale lies behind this one. A terrifyingly dull, finicky tale, but a tale nonetheless. Here be the book in question:













A UK hardback first edition of William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms, published by Bloomsbury in 2009. I've wanted to get hold of a copy of this ever since it was first published; Boyd is firmly in the 'literary' tradition, with a backlist embracing a fair number of historical fiction novels – basically the kind of thing I usually steer well clear of. But when I heard about Ordinary Thunderstorms, around the time of its publication, it sounded rather good: a thriller about a man falsely accused of murder and pursued by both the police and the real killer. I was undergoing a burgeoning interest in mid- to late-twentieth century thrillers at the time – still am – and this seemed like a contemporary take on the genre, except with a little more depth than a lot of what passes for thrillers these days (stand up, Dan Brown et al). In particular, I was intrigued by the notion of a section in the book where the 'hero' hides out on traffic roundabout.

So I figured I'd get meself a copy and give it a go. Except, being the tiresome nerd that I am, I wanted to get a true first edition – in other words, a first printing of the hardback. I checked out the bookshops round this way, but all anyone seemed to have were trade paperbacks – those larger format softcovers that publishers sometimes release to the trade in lieu of a hardback. I had a look up in London too, but still no joy. I knew first edition hardbacks did exist – I'd seen them listed online, but they only seemed to be signed first editions for exorbitant prices. The Firsts in Print website had some of those, but I wasn't about to pay forty quid for a new hardback. That same website also stated that the hardback was only printed in tiny quantities, for libraries and for the signed edition.

Amazon's listing for the hardback said it was out of stock, but that more were due soon. But I had a feeling those would be reprints, and sure enough the hardback's now been through at least four printings. So I did what any slightly insane and obsessive book collector would do: I decided the book was probably crap anyway and gave up. And then the other day I decided to have another look online, just on the offchance, and on Amazon found a listing from a seller for a first edition hardback, for a tenner. Probably not a true first, I reasoned, but might as well drop them a line and see if it has the full strike-off line. See, it's all about that line of numbers on the indicia page; if a book has a full set from 1 to 10, it's a first printing.

The seller got back to me, said they'd have a look at the book... and then ten minutes later they emailed again and told me that yes, it did have the full number line. And it does:










So there you go. Success, finally. A true first edition of William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms, good as new, bought for a quarter of what it would've set me back originally. Sometimes it pays to wait.

Told you it was a terrifyingly dull, finicky tale. Don't say you weren't warned.

'Course, what'll happen now is I'll read the book and discover it really is crap after all.