Rating: 2/5
Review:
Not for me
I’m sorry to say that I gave up on Love around half way through. I
like much of Roddy Doyle’s work and thought Smile was very good,
but I couldn’t be doing with this one.
Love consists of two
old friends meeting after a longish break and getting slowly drunker
and drunker as they catch up on their lives and go in for a lot of
introspection and analysis of their relationships. Doyle, of course,
has brilliant moment of insight and occasionally puts his finger on
something important about men – like the sudden transition to
adulthood they discover, for example. However, even this went on
far too long and I struggled to engage with either of the central
characters so their increasingly incoherent dialogue and thoughts
went from not very interesting to slightly repellent. The layout
doesn’t help: dialogue is marked by a dash rather than quotation
marks, and is also punctuated liberally with dashes within sentences,
making it hard to know who is speaking much of the time. Eventually
I decided that life was too short and, Roddy Doyle or no Roddy Doyle,
I bailed out.
Others may well
enjoy this more than me, but personally I can’t recommend it.
(My thanks to
Jonathan Cape for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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