Rating: 4/5
Review:
Very enjoyable
I enjoyed The Lunar Cats.
Lynne Truss is a very funny writer who has genuine erudition beneath the
humour an the combination works well here.
(The Lunar Cats follows on from Cat Out Of Hell, but it works fine as a
stand-alone book.)
The set-up is silly but engaging. There are some cats who are highly
intelligent and capable of speech. Some
are plain evil and in league with Beelzebub, others are near immortal and are
members of The Lunar Cats, a Learned Society formed in the enlightenment and
Truss derives a lot of genuine humour from a bunch of cats conducting
themselves like eighteenth-century gentlemen.
The plotis narrated by Alec, a mild-mannered retired librarian who gets
caught up in all this. It is enjoyably
silly, involving an evil talking kitten, an evil stolen Tahitian idol,
appointments with Beelzebub and so on and the battle by Alec and The Lunar Cats
to thwart them. It is amiable, readable
fun.
There is also a good deal here about the voyages of Captain
Cook and their subsequent chronicling and publication, which Truss manages to
make engaging and very interesting, so there is a solid intellectual core which
anchors the absurdity, making it witty rather than just silly. I found that a very good aspect of the book
which left me with a sense of having read something of substance as well as it
just being plain funny.
Perhaps this isn't a classic, but it's a very enjoyable and
engaging read, underpinned by proper research and learning. Recommended.
(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)
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