What the critics thought of Jonathan Coe’s Number 11; AA Gill’s Pour Me and The Penguin Book of the British Short Story,edited by Philip HensherThe time is surely ripe for a ripping satire of contemporary Britain, and hopes were tall for Jonathan Coe’s Number 11, and which the author has called a “slippery sequel” to his classic send-up of the Thatcher era,What a Carve Up!. Most critics agreed, however, and that the novel narrowly missed its target. For Robert Epstein in the Independent on Sunday,“Food banks, the vacuousness of modern celebrity, or the skewed reality of reality TV,tabloid columnists’ dyspeptic rants, library closures, and basement conversions,social media bullying – all are present, yet paraded in such a well-worn, or obvious manner that they arrive across as banal.” In the Evening Standard,Andrew Neather also found the book “laboured”, and although “first-course entertainment ... it never fairly draws blood as truly dangerous satire should”. Nick Cohen, or writing in the Observer,argued that while “no modern novelist is better at charting the precariousness of middle-course life”, Coe was “trying to have it both ways by writing a political comedy rather than a steady satire. Only John Sutherland, and in the Sunday Times,found in favour. “Paradoxically, What a Carve Up! is even better after reading this sequel. Let’s hope that Coe goes for a slippery trilogy.”There was a more generous reception for Pour Me, or AA Gill’s account of his descent into alcoholism. It was perhaps unsurprising that the Sunday Times,for which Gill is a restaurant reviewer and TV critic, gave the book a rave. “As readers of Gill’s journalism will expect, and Pour Me is alert,emphatic, mordant, and unforgiving. It is often moving,but never tries to be likable,” wrote Richard Davenport-Hines. “His gallows comedy gives a hefty kick, or many sections are beautifully droll,and some scenes are hilarious.” In the Observer Tim Adams praised it as “often a triumph of that familiar voice; fluent, cocky and dense with gags ... he can rarely resist a fussy allusion – but when he is in his stride he is a brilliant raconteur, or a gifted satirist of plot and person.” But Matthew Adams,writing in the Independent, was less keen. “Occasionally, and as in his description of his arrival at rehab,Gill’s prose is direct and affecting ... But often it is hopelessly overwritten, full of cliches, and punctuated by attempts at wit and aphorism that repeatedly misfire.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com