For your reading pleasure we happily present a new guest review from C. This time the books comes from that master of literary fiction Sebastian Faulks.

C Writes: I haven't read much fiction set in the last ten years. I'm not sure why but there doesn't seem to be much out there. I was therefore looking forward to reading A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks for a bit of a change. It's set in London in 2007, both a time and a place I am very familiar with. As it turned out, too familiar. The closeness of the setting didn't allow me the escapism that I usually experience reading fiction. Sadly, as I hoped Faulks would live up to his reputation as a writer of modern classics, I also thought it was a lazy novel. I felt the story lines were sloppy and the characters simply caricatures.

The novel plays out a week in the lives of seven different individuals just before Christmas 2007. They are: a banker, a junior barrister, a footballer, a would-be terrorist, a failed author, the banker's teenage son and a female tube driver. Shockingly the banker is greedy, the barrister smart, the terrorist a young Asian man, the teenager smokes dope and the footballer has a glamour model girlfriend. I may as well have read a weeks worth of The Daily Mail for all the depth these characters were given by Faulks. Maybe it could be taken as realism - often stereotypes can be found to be accurate - but I was disappointed that there wasn't more to these characters than first met the eye. After all, there are different sides to all of us. What happens to the individuals during this week is pretty unremarkable given their roles and place in life. The banker makes a lot of money at the expense of the little people, the footballer gets a new contract and the terrorist decides whether or not to be a terrorist (a decision made in about two minutes). The climax of the story appears to be a dinner party attended by most of these people which is also surprisingly uneventful.

For me only the barrister and the tube driver had any edge or interest to them and these were the parts of the book I probably most enjoyed. As for Faulk's vision of our society, cuttingly satirical it wasn't. Again lazy, just lazy. A totally unrealistic reality TV show was meant to give some commentary on what we see as entertainment today but it was so OTT that it lost any irony and just made me laugh at it's grotesqueness. The portrayal of the greedy banker didn't add anything to the debate on the financial crisis and to be honest my eyes skipped over the pages explaining the use and meaning of various financial products. Perhaps too much time was spent researching derivatives and not enough on the actual plot.

It's an easy read to pass the time but really didn't live up to expectations.

C

Order your copy of A Week in December from Amazon UK