Rating: 1/5
Review:
Lazy, unconvincing and unfunny
I don't like writing wholly critical reviews, but I'm afraid
I hated The Gentleman. I had expected to
enjoy it as a clever comic romp, but – very unusually for me – I abandoned it
in sheer annoyance after a few chapters.
The premise is good: it purports to be a first person
account (edited by a friend) of the unwilling adventures of a Victorian
Gentleman who is idle, profligate and vain, but entirely self-deluded as to his
own prowess as a writer (and most other things). I was hoping for wit and a clever parody of
Victorian style and mores. I'm afraid
what I got was a lazy, careless pastiche of Victorian style by yet another US
author who thinks that Victorian gentlemen said things like "which boggled
the mind" or "has gotten worse" or "I can't figure
out…" (all this in just the first few pages), or that an aristocratic
Victorian young lady of sixteen would respond to unexpected news with "Oh
my God. Oh my *God*." It was at this point that I really began to
lose patience, and I bailed out a little while later – not just because she continually
spoke like a present-day Californian teenager but because the whole thing is
sloppy, unconvincing and nothing like as funny as it thinks it is.
I'm sorry to be so harsh, and it's unusual for me to dislike
a book so vehemently, but I really don’t think this should be foisted on a
British audience. In order to work, even
as a comic novel, it needs to have some degree of accuracy and verisimilitude. It's as though I had written an action
thriller about a daring US Marine sortie into present-day Syria, say, where the
commander says things like, "I say, you chaps – buck up!"
Enough. Personally I'd
recommend giving this one a wide berth.
(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)
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