Mark Lawson - The Deaths

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good social reportage but a less good novel

I was hoping for great things from this book. I think Mark Lawson is an excellent journalist and broadcaster and a brilliant cultural critic, and he has also written some of the best radio plays I have ever heard. Some of that comes through in this book, but as a whole novel I do have reservations about it.

Mark Lawson creates believable characters and has an exceptionally good ear for the way people use language. The book examines the minutiae of the lives of four rich families in Buckinghamshire, with some detail of the lives of others and a small amount of police investigation, which is actually very well done but is a very minor part of the book, and this is certainly not a crime novel. It is, as others have said, a piece of social observation of our time. It's often very well done with plenty of sharp insight and nice little one-liners like "...[he] blames Top Gear for the fact that so many British men now regard conversation as violently belittling banter." We get a decent portrait of the lives and attitudes of the wealthy, with their competitive one-upmanship and so on, but Lawson also throws in the points of view of a lot of other people and vignettes about disgraced but still greedy bank CEOs, MPs expenses, various kinds of on-line behaviour and a huge number of other modern social phenomena. He also takes incidental swipes at a lot of his own modern irritations like textspeak, the book group member who doesn't like a book because she wouldn't want any of the characters for a friend, the shallowness of a lot of theatre audiences...and so on and so on.

There is so much social detail that the book sometimes feels as though it's drowning in it all. The problem for it as a novel is that this almost completely swamps any real interaction or development in any of the characters. We see them mainly in a sequence of set pieces: on a pre-Christmas shopping trip to Marrakesh, on the train, at a Christmas party, at the Christmas morning service, shooting on a Sunday, walking the dogs... and so on and so on. (And I confess that I got to the stage where I was saying, "Oh, not blooming Waitrose again," although "blooming" isn't the exact word I used.) It's social reportage rather than a novel, and, although the reportage is very good, I found 500 pages of it is far too much to wade through.

The last hundred pages or so did pick up and were rather touching in places, and there's enough other good stuff here for me to (just) round up 3.5 stars to 4, but it's a long slog in places and, however much I admire Mark Lawson's other work, I can only give this a very qualified recommendation.