I’m a little ambivalent about Making Nice; it’s well written and quite a decent satire of the spin industry, but it didn’t feel particularly original and had an implausibly gullible character at its heart.
Dickie Pentecost is an experienced and respected political correspondent for a rather staid newspaper. While on holiday with his family he meets the charismatic and rather mysterious Ethel (short for Ethelbert) who is terrifyingly knowledgeable about the Pentecost family. When Dickie is made suddenly redundant, Ethel appears with a lucrative job offer at Making Nice, a flashy “reputation management” company. This leads him into the PR world world of spin, distraction and outright lies where truth and integrity are alien concepts and people are just data to be manipulated.
It’s well enough done and it’s certainly a very timely satire, but I did think that it had largely been said before in plenty of TV programmes like Ballot Monkeys and books like Robert Webb’s Come Again. Dickie is an experienced international journalist and I found it very hard to believe that he was so naive that he couldn’t quickly see through a corrupt African politician or the monstrous backers of a US presidential candidate. I thought his family story was better, but the denouement of the whole book was very conveniently quick and pat, so it felt a bit unsatisfactory.
Making Nice was well enough written to (just!) round 3.5 stars up to 4. It’s readable and enjoyable, but perhaps not as scathing or funny as it intended to be.
(My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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