Rating: 3/5
Review:
Not Jonathan Lynn's best work
Jonathan Lynn is a brilliant comic writer, but I didn't
think Mayday added up to all that much in the end.
First published in 1993, this is the story of Ernest Mayday,
a cynical and grumpy Englishman and writer of potboilers who has moved to Hollywood
to work but who finds himself blocked.
His girlfriend is heavily involved in a "church" whose founder
and guru is about to be tried for financial and sexual misconduct. Mayday becomes embroiled in a clever,
convoluted scheme to try to get the inside story and adapt it for his next
novel, while at the same time pitching a screenplay for an adaptation of an
earlier book.
It is all very well written and it's a decent story, but it
did feel a bit stale to me, I'm afraid.
The targets of Lynn's satire are all thoroughly deserving of ridicule;
vacuous intellectual pretentiousness, the shallowness and dishonesty of the
film business, exploitative fake religions, the mangling of language and so
on…but they have all been pretty thoroughly skewered both before and since
Mayday was published. This ended up
feeling a bit like an amalgam of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, The Bonfire Of
The Vanities (which Lynn explicitly
references) and the TV series Episodes.
The story just managed to keep me reading and is cleverly twisty, but it
did get very wordy and preachy, especially in the last few chapters, and in the
end I was rather glad to finish the book.
For me, this hasn't aged all that well and for a comedy
genius like Jonathan Lynn, I don’t think it counts among his best work. It's OK, but no more, I think.
(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)
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