Conrad Williams - Unfinished Business

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very good, involving book

I thought Unfinished Business was a very good book.  I approached it with some scepticism; a novel about authors and agents in the London literary world could well have been just more self-regarding navel-gazing, but I liked the style, I found it quite gripping and it was actually rather incisive about some important things.

The publisher's blurb blithely gives away the plot of the first third of the book, so I won't repeat it.  The book is largely narrated in the first person by Mike de Vere, a moderately successful thirty-something literary agent who cares about literary quality and about his authors, however annoying they may be.  As both his work and personal lives suffer major blows, he has to reassess much of what he is doing and try to revive his fortunes in both.  It doesn't sound all that alluring, but Conrad Williams writes so well that I was drawn in from the start by both Mike's style and the brilliant pictures he paints of the characters and the world he moves in, both in London and in rural Wales.  He is struggling against the wholly unliterary commodification of books and publishing, and in his shrewd observations about that world he makes some telling points about the direction of the world and what it values in general.  I found his characters extremely well painted and remarkably believable and Mike's sincere attempts at decency and his weaknesses and flaws rang very true.  This became, in the end, quite a tense story which has what I thought was a mature, thoughtful ending.

This fairly early passage will give a flavour of the style, in which Mike is comparing his list of authors to that of a ruthless fellow agent,

"I watched my list turn into a graveyard of mid-list fiction tryers struggling to get airborne,; of alcoholic biographers light years behind on their delivery dates; of literary pups kennelled at Faber or Picador, the soon-to-be-pelts of road-kill in the retail sector's turf wars; and just one lucrative anomaly: Melina Fukakowski, the bombshell TV presenter, acquired as a client by the guys in Film/TV and passed my way to handle her tie-in tome.  ('Handle' is too loaded, too teasing a word to describe my fraught navigation of Melina's mouth-wateringly buxom but bossy personality through a deal process that put the curvy prof on BBC Two, and then saw two hundred thousand copies of her book mince sexily from the stores.)"

If that appeals to you, you'll like the book; if it doesn't, you won't.  I did, very much – although I did find the occasional, brief breaks into third-person narrative very annoying.  It wasn't enough to spoil my enjoyment, though; I found this readable, thoughtful and rather exciting, with some important things to say, including about human frailties, fulfilment and non-fulfilment, empty commercialism, the importance of family and the pain of its lack.  I enjoyed this far more than I expected to and can recommend it warmly.

(I received a free ARC via Netgalley.)