Matt McAvoy Book Review

I must be brutally honest here and say that I was torn by how I was going to rate this book; I decided to go with 3 stars, and truthfully this was the generous option.  I’ve don’t mean offence; it is not that I don’t rate Christopher Griffith – quite the opposite, in fact; he is clearly a tremendously gifted author, and it was for precisely this reason that I felt unable to sing the book’s praises.  In short, it could have been very, very good.  Paradoxically, then, this was also the very same reason that I felt it deserved the higher star rating.

I feel I should clarify.  The latter couple of stories in this five-tale anthology show the sublime language and syntax of which Christopher is capable – almost melodic in its quality; were his writing like this all the way through, the book would be a shoe-in.  But it isn’t; rather, the author has opted for strange, punchy narrative formatting, in single sentences almost throughout.  He is clearly an intellectual and a wordsmith, of that there is no doubt, and the fact is shared explicitly, but the quickfire sentences which make up the majority of this book, often without context, may not be to all tastes.  Don’t get me wrong, I like different styles and formats used within a fiction book, and I think that Christopher should have more unambiguously selected and used them, in earnest.  There is the opening title story, which seems written in large parts in the style of poetic prose, and may perhaps have been better suited to commit to one style or the other.  The next two tales are rich in dialogue, particularly the farce-style comedy “Break Out the Bubbly!!” which I felt might be more suitable as a stage play.  I believe that a conventional choice of style for each story would have improved the book immensely.

Christopher clearly knows his classic literature, and you can definitely see homage to Shakespeare in his work, as well as Golding’s Lord of the Flies, both of which are explicitly referenced.  Indeed, “William Ottoway’s Utopia” (the story) could be described as the result were Lord of the Flies written by Shakespeare in 21^st century language.  As it is, this and all of the tales in the book were written by a fantastic author, with good, creative stories and tremendous prose, but the lack of sentence construction and conventional formatting did not showcase his capabilities enough, and let the book down quite a lot for me.