The Wych Elm

The writing was terrible. In fact it was so terrible that it made me angry, and the only way I could keep going was by highlighting particularly poorly-written sections on my Kindle. Here are some excerpts:

- “I wasn't really in the state to describe incipient epiphanies to Sean - there was no way I could even have pronounced “incipient epiphanies” - but I did my best.
- “He even looked farther away, as if he had deliberately receded a few steps down some long passageway, although I was pretty sure that had to do with the booze.”
- “For some reason this is the mistake - hardly a mistake, really, what's wrong with having a few pints on a Friday night after a stressful week, what's wrong with wanting the girl you love to think the best of you? - this is the choice to which I return over and over...“
- “He was holding a sheaf of cryptic-looking paper that I assumed was my chart, whatever that meant.”
- ...“gossip about her flatmate's latest drama (Megan was a petulant, nitpicky girl who managed a chichi organic-raw-kale-type cafe and couldn't work out why everyone she met turned out to be an arsehole; only Melisa could have lived with her for any length of time):” ...

The final one that broke me involved a long and detailed aside about brochures. Here's the thing about asides: they take you out of the flow of the story, that is to say to the side of it, and there had better be a good fucking reason why an author is doing this to a reader. The payoff must be more than an extra dose of detail, and in every aside that the author makes in this book all we get is more pointless detail.

It is all tell, no show in this book, and that is an unpardonable sin. HARD PASS.

A wonderful pan of tasty word soup. It's probably not for everyone, especially if you like your crime thrillers at 9 twists per hour. But, if like me, you love 2 pages worth of beautiful prose about someone using their big toe to move a coffee table so they can flick their cigarette ash into a marble ashtray, so much so that your toe curls in sympathy, then this is the book for you.