Pierre Lemaitre - The Great Swindle

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Dull and unconvincing (and poorly translated, too)

I really didn't get on with this book.  I tried it because I read Alex a while ago and thought it a decent thriller.  This was a very severe disappointment.

The story begins close to the end of the First World War in 1918 in the French lines where a frankly pantomimic villain tries to kills two of the soldiers under his command.  The subsequent plot involves their entangled subsequent activities in conflicting scams in the years immediately after the war…and I'm afraid I thought the whole thing was dismally poor.

Part of the problem is in the wholly unconvincing characterisation, which seemed to me to be clunky and clichéd, and in the period setting which is incredibly laboured but again failed to convince or involve me at all.  The style is plodding, and having characters say things like "The guy is overwrought," or "Is there a problem?" made it seem utterly unlike 1918.  And, oh dear - it does go on.  And on and on.  It takes ages for anything to happen as we're dragged through seemingly unending descriptions of things and events which don't convince.

Some of this is due to the translation, which I think is verging on the insultingly bad.  It is larded with cliché and stale usages; the second paragraph of the book begins, "He knew all too well…" which made my heart sink, and a couple of pages later in a just a single paragraph we get "his parlous situation", "legend had it", "the inexorable decline", and "rested squarely on his shoulders."  The whole book is like this and stale, amateurish stuff like this simply isn't good enough from a professional translator - or a respectable publisher, for that matter.  Tenses slip confusingly and randomly from present to past, the tone is inappropriately arch or ironic in places…I could go on, but that will do.  It is rare for me to give up on a book, but after diligently slogging through the first 120 pages I decided that life was too short and just skimmed and sampled the rest.  It didn't get better – and I grasped the story without having to wade through the prose, which was a blessing. 

I'm sorry to be so critical, but I really thought this was a poor book.  I have given it two stars, but only because it wasn't quite bad enough to made me actively angry (unlike Alex Grecian's The Yard, for example – but it's best not to get me started on that one) but I wouldn't recommend this at all.