The Upgrade is the follow up to Paul Carr’s Bringing Nothing to the Party, to which I gave a qualified positive review a few months ago:

This clearly isn’t a heavy-weight, profound, life-changing book, but it has no pretentions in that direction. It’s a short, fun and funny autobiographical tale, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Compared to Bringing Nothing to the Party, I found The Upgrade to be a hard slog. The book essentially continues Carr’s autobiographical tale, picking up where the previous volume left off. Carr reaches the realisation that rental prices in London are exceptionally high, and that he could likely live in hotels for less. And so, he commits himself to a nomadic lifestyle in which he travels the world living in hotels. This book is advertised as his guide to following in those footsteps.

Of course, few people have a job or lifestyle that would be conducive to travelling the world on a whim. Carr himself acknowledges this in the book, pointing out that most other self-help books also offer solutions that work only within the context of the author’s life. And yet, Carr doesn’t really offer much insight, either. His oft-repeated guide to getting cheap rates in a hotel comes down to three points:

1. Claim to be a journalist and ask for the uber-secret “media rate”, even if this involves going via the hotel’s PR firm.
2. Stay for a long time – preferably over a month – and negotiate a long-stay discount.
3. Travel out of season, and charge your friends to visit you.

If the existence of any of these three methods of obtaining cheap hotel stays comes as a surprise, then perhaps you’ll enjoy this book more than me. It’s also worth pointing out that Paul’s travels “around the world” consist almost exclusively of staying in a handful of cities in the US, and a handful of villages in Europe.

So, discounting the useless self-help angle, we’re left with an autobiographical tale. Unfortunately, the story is one of an increasingly unlikeable self-obsessed character becoming an alcoholic and spending every night getting drunk, to the extent that he cannot remember his actions the following morning. Imagine the following sequence on a loop:

1. Paul goes to a party full of beautiful women and gets blind drunk.
2. Paul wakes up (often naked and in public) and cannot remember the previous night.
3. Paul discovers that he has offended someone with his drunken behaviour.
4. Paul attempts to make amends – with “hilarious” consequences!

This cycle becomes rapidly very dull indeed.

On a stylistic note, Carr is a heavy user of the “amusing” footnote. I’m not a fan of the use of footnotes for content (as opposed to references) at the best of times. I often think it’s indicative of poorly structured writing, as though the writer is unable to adequately structure their thoughts in such a way as to incorporate asides into the main body of their work, expand upon them, or edit them out.¹ You may draw your own conclusions on my opinion of footnotes like Carr’s:

*Okey-dokey

*I shit you not!

†Really, I shit you not!

Unfortunately, this use of “amusing” footnotes is becoming more and more common of late – though I’m not entirely sure of the reasons for it. I recently reviewed Richard Bacon’s book, A Series of Unrelated Events, and this suffered from exactly the same problem.

Part of the attraction of Bringing Nothing to the Party was getting the inside story on the development of some of the dotcom bubble’s hottest properties. Upgrade has none of this, as Paul writes almost exclusively about his own flagging career as a freelance writer and blogger. This career does not make for interesting reading.

Despite all that is wrong with this book, there is a feel-good uptick at the end. This may be a spoiler. Carr has an epiphany, realises he is an alcoholic, and begins abstaining. Unfortunately, this interesting development is where the book – frustratingly – ends. Had this been the start, I think the book would likely have been an altogether more interesting prospect.

As it stands, however, the surprising ending and occasional half-decent pun are not sufficient counterbalance to improve an otherwise poor volume. In essence, this book recounts a dull, repetitive tale with little to say, and few insights to offer.

The Upgrade is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

¹My own occasional tedious use of footnotes proves this rule.

Richard Bacon is perhaps best known as the only Blue Peter presenter to be sacked. He’s also the presenter of the afternoon show on BBC Radio 5 Live, to which I occasionally listen.

A Series of Unrelated Events is his first book. It’s an autobiography of various surreal moments in his life, presented out of sequence and with no connecting narrative. I’m a little unnerved by the use of the word “series” in the title, given that the events described are not chronological. Clearly, “series” does not necessarily imply chronology, but it unsettles me nonetheless. And, as you might imagine, a series of out-of-sequence anecdotes doesn’t add up to a particularly coherent whole.

From listening on 5 Live, I’ve often thought that there are two sides to Richard Bacon. One side is serious, intelligent and insightful. This side is shown most commonly when he’s handling breaking news, or following a long-running news story, or interviewing someone particularly newsworthy and interesting. The other side is faux-blokey, flippant, and a little arrogant. This side is shown most commonly on slow news days, or when he’s presenting one of his many predictable and relatively dull “features”.

Unfortunately, this book is written almost exclusively by the latter side of Richard Bacon. There are some chapters where the former gets a look in: particularly the first, about his sacking from Blue Peter, and one near the end of the book, in which he talks about internet trolls. But most of the rest is written in the faux-blokey style, with “hilarious” anecdotes about subjects like hiding the fact he’d drunk a bottle of wine by replacing the contents with water, people having sex at his wedding, and outsourcing his film review column to a friend.

I suspect that this is a book that could be improved dramatically through the employment of a very good editor. As a first draft, this book is fine: it just needs somebody to point out which of the anecdotes don’t work and should be dropped, explain which bits Bacon should expand with richer detail and wider discussion, and a judicious use of coloured pen to tidy up his often infuriatingly affected writing style.

This perception is reinforced by a number of asides which surely should have been edited. For example, when re-introducing a character from a previous anecdote, Bacon says:

Let’s call him Jack (I can’t remember if I identify him in that earlier chapter and can’t be bothered to check).

Perhaps this is supposed to be humorous. Perhaps I am supposed to laugh. If I read this on someone’s blog, perhaps I would chuckle and roll my eyes. But when I’ve paid for a book, I expect this sort of thing to be edited out. I don’t want to see the process of writing, I want to be immersed in the content. But, as I say, perhaps I’m over-reacting to a joke I didn’t find funny.

Yet here’s another exhibit: there is a chapter which Bacon opens in the voice of Charles Dickens. That is precisely as painful as it sounds, and he gets bored with his terrible impression part way though:

Now read on, as Richard Bacon takes up the story.

That you, Charles. And sorry readers, that didn’t really work out as I’d hoped. He doesn’t half go on a bit.

Again, this is a passage that is more cringe-worthy than funny – perhaps passable on an amateurish blog (like mine). But, as if to reinforce that the editing on this volume has been sloppy, the following appears at the end of the chapter:

Postscript

Eagle-eyed readers might have noticed that the first half of the chapter was written in the style of Charles Dickens and the second not. This is because the Charles Dickens bit was taking too long and I got bored.

Why repeat what he’s already pointed out earlier in the text? Pass the red pen, please.

I guess what frustrates me most about this book is that Bacon has an interesting career story to tell, and the intelligence and wit to tell it well. Instead, it feels like he’s been left largely to his own devices, and so gone somewhat off piste. As a collection of anecdotes written by a minor celebrity, it isn’t bad… but I’m ultimately left disappointed, because I know it could have been so much better.

I very much hope that Bacon one day has the opportunity to write a decent, considered memoir. Perhaps that’s something one can’t do part-way through one’s career. Perhaps the distance isn’t great enough to allow for proper reflection. But, if he does go on to write one, I suspect I’d wholeheartedly recommend it. And I think there’s just enough promise in the better chapters of Unrelated Events to grudgingly recommend this first draft of history until that day.

A Series of Unrelated Events is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle. Many thanks to Cornerstone Publishing for supplying a free copy for the purpose of this review.

Guardian Angel is an autobiography penned by Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips. In an interesting conceptual move away from the traditional autobiography, it is focussed on only two aspects of her life: her changing relationship with her parents, and her political shift from writing for the left-wing Guardian to the right-wing Daily Mail. As it happens, I think that’s a pretty good concept. The way in which relationships with parents change over the course of a lifetime is a deeply personal yet universal topic, while the political shift is perhaps the most interesting public aspect of Phillips’s life.

If this book was fiction, it would quickly become a literary classic. It would be a tragicomic character study worthy of Ricky Gervais, but with a subtlety in the detail revealing the flawed perspective of the narrator worthy of any classic author. It would represent a fusion of the tools and techniques of some of literature’s greatest works with a modern storyline and sensibility. I, for one, would be raving about it. And so, perhaps I should review it in those terms.

The narrator has a virtually messianic opinion of herself, which lends itself readily to the tragicomic form. The book opens with the narrator grandly describing herself in the third person:

The child lay tensely in the darkness, in a bed that was not her own. A crisis had placed her there, and impending and unimaginable horror which only one person could prevent.

The “unimaginable horror” turns out to be the death of the child’s aunt: no doubt a tragic event, but hardly “unimaginable”. This third person drama continues for some time, before the predictable, but no less comically dramatic, dénouement of the opening passage:

I was that child.

This is a very effective opening to a character study. In a few hundred words, it gives the measure of the narrator, especially her propensity for hyperbole and drama, and the third person narrative structure strikes a strong note of ego. The tendency towards dramatic hyperbole is reinforced early on. The narrator describes her childhood dislike for her paternal grandmother’s “grim slum” – which she also, somewhat inconsistently, describes as a “fine Georgian terrace”. The narrator describes the house’s oval windows, and – such was her dislike for the property –

to this day I cannot look at upright oval shapes … without my heart lurching, absurdly, into my mouth.

The monstrous ego of the character is infused throughout the text, though is perhaps most obviously reinforced by two passages: one, which is far too long to quote, in which she lists a number of perceived personal insults from other journalists (as distinct from multiple passages in which she lists criticisms of her work); and another, in which she describes the magnitude of her level of understanding of “Middle Britain”.

There are issues on which the Mail and I do not agree. I myself seemed to have an umbilical cord to Middle Britain.

Another exemplary passage is this:

Without wishing to sound boastful, I believe that on issue after issues where the evidence is now finally in, I have been proved right.

This latter passage is made more amusing by her citation of global warming as an issue “where the evidence is now finally in”; evidence which, apparently, confirms her view that man-made global warming is a oil-company perpetuated “scam which has hoodwinked millions and cost billions”. Hence, the narrator is comprehensively established as unreliable, egotistical and deeply flawed.

This characterisation groundwork is quite crucial, as the opinions described by the narrator as her own offer a crescendo of offence. Had the character not already been established as a tragicomic creation, the humour in the illogic of the offerings would be overshadowed by the level of offence they contain.

Given the concentration of the book on her own relationship with her parents, it is unsurprising that the narrator proselytises extensively about family structures. There is considerable depth about her own difficult relationship with her father, which she claims inflicted “lifelong harm”. Her father was present, but disengaged. From this, the narrator draws the illogical conclusion that divorce is harmful to children. I hardly need point out that divorce and remarriage in her case may well have equipped the narrator with the strong father-figure she claims to have lacked, where a refusal to divorce removes this possibility. In common with the opinions expressed in the rest of the book, an initial expression of dissatisfaction with the state of “modern Britain” builds to a climax of breathtaking offensiveness.

In this case, the narrator is both “perplexed” and “appalled” by the simple statement of fact that there are circumstances in which it is acceptable for a mother to leave her husband, and thus become a single parent,

and more, that it is her ‘right’ to choose such a lifestyle.

Indeed, the narrator goes on to later describe divorcees and children born out of wedlock as “deviants”, despite undermining even the technical definition of the word by quoting statistics showing that almost half of British marriages end in divorce. Yet, simultaneously, the narrator claims not to be “judging individuals”.

With similar illogic, the narrator accuses the BBC of racism for considering the needs of “Asian and African-Carribbean audiences”, and – with particular poignancy given the publisher of this book – that mainstream publishers will not publish her work because it is too factually correct.

Hopefully, I have now given you a flavour of the structure of the book, and perhaps some sense of the way in which the layers of tragedy, comedy and farce interplay in a cohesive and rather engaging way. Yet there are two other layers to this work which raise it above the level of its peers.

The first of these two additions is the peppering of one-liners which encapsulate all three elements of the main narrative. Most of these are difficult to quote in a review, as they are heavily dependent on some length of preceding material, yet I shall try to give a flavour. There is a long section in which the narrator describes the negative reaction to one of her earlier books, in which she proposed sweeping changes to the British system of education. She then extensively quotes criticism of this work. In response to other writers’ accusations that her proposals went against research evidence, she writes:

So all the teachers, educational psychologists, government inspectors … parents and pupils to whom I had spoken were not evidence, merely ‘anecdote’

To end a defensive rant against her critics with a statement of such profound bathos is, surely, comic genius.

The second exalting addition is the rich vein of unjust persecution running through the book. This juxtaposes the narrators abhorrent opinions with her own sense of persecution at the hands of others. There is one profoundly brilliant passage in which, in the context of her views on Israel, she claims

I could never relax when turning on the radio or TV, opening a newspaper or going to a dinner party, for fear of hearing some libellous accusation or other casual prejudice

The remarkable device of having this narrator complain about casual prejudice demonstrates the lack of insight possessed by the character in an exceptionally clever and highly amusing manner. This point is further emphasised by the inconsistency of opinion presented. Towards the end of her book, she claims

In my view, polarised thinking represents precisely the problem that no so bedevils politics in the UK and America. The left/right argument, which forecloses any balanced approach, simply wipes out any political space on which people can meet and discuss issues on the basis of reasoned debate rather than ideological name-calling.

It is hard to suppress a smile as the character is revealed as a brazen hypocrite, as she herself engages in something close to ideological name-calling:

The left is not on the side of truth, reason, and justice, but instead promotes ideology, malice, and oppression. Rather than fighting the abuse of power, it embodies it.

Of course, the problem with this interpretation of the book is that it is not fiction. This is a book written by one of Britain’s best-paid newspaper columnist, who credibly claims to have the ear of government. Her Gordian knot of inconsistent opinion, pseudo-mortality, and prejudice is what passes for sociopolitical commentary in one of the country’s best-selling and most influential newspapers.

There is some undeniable literary quality to this book, but only when judged beyond its own terms. Within its own terms – that is, as a non-fiction piece – it contains such odious opinions, repulsive arguments and factual distortions that I struggle to believe that it can represent the views of its well-educated author. It feels like it might be pandering of the worst kind, content written purely to falsely reinforce inaccurate prejudices.

As it seems only fair for my “star rating” to judge the book on its own terms, I’ve given it the minimum rating – one star – but hope that doesn’t detract from the qualities that this book does, albeit unintentionally, offer.

Guardian Angel is available now from amazon.co.uk in Kindle format only. Many thanks to emBooks for supplying a free copy for the purpose of this review.

I’ve reviewed several Dan Brown books on this site in the past. As I sat down to write this review, my memory was that I’d always pretty much laid into them with unremitting criticism. In fact, that’s not true. I was rather more positive than I remembered being.

Of Digital Fortress, I said:

One knows what one is getting into when one buys a Dan Brown book … Sometimes, it’s just what you’re after.

Of Angels and Demons, I said:

The storyline is good, and it’s an entertaining book.

Of The Da Vinci Code, I said:

It was a fairly enjoyable book … certainly worth reading, but don’t expect a masterpiece.

Looking through the archives, it seems I never got round to reviewing The Lost Symbol, though I remember – perhaps falsely – that reading it was a bit of a trial.

I mention all of this because I approached Inferno with the expectation that I would hate it. I wanted to be amused by Brown’s crazy use of language, and even crazier use of ideology. I wanted to find myself amused at the predictable structure of a art-themed treasure trail, which Robert Langdon would complete just in the nick of time. I was looking forward to writing a scathing and somewhat amusing one-star review.

But, as I read, I unexpectedly found myself enjoying this book. It isn’t high art by any means: Dan Brown’s amusingly clunky leaden prose retains its knack for destroying any semblance of atmosphere, the plot is described and recapped constantly for those who weren’t paying attention, and many of the events are predictable.

But Brown has fixed some of the problems that detracted from his earlier works. By and large, Brown has avoided having hero Robert Langdon deliver long speeches explaining points of art history when he is supposedly in a race for his life. Instead, these are accommodated through a combination of flashbacks, and through delivery by other characters who have no knowledge of the wider plot. This isn’t rocket science, but it does improve things considerably.

Brown also manages to deliver several plot twists in this volume that aren’t obvious from the start. The plot of his previous books is entirely predictable: not so this volume. This makes it far more engaging.

Yet not all of the problems have been solved. Brown still writes hilariously clunky prose:

He half wondered if he might at any moment wake up in his reading chair at home, clutching an empty martini glass and a copy of Dead Souls, only to remind himself that Bombay Sapphire and Gogol should never be mixed.

Brown is still utterly incapable of giving his main characters distinct voices. When he attempts to distinguish the voices of minor characters, he resorts to quite hilarious stereotype:

Sienna, eez Danikova! Where you?! Eez terrible! Your friend Dr. Marconi, he dead! Hospital going craaazy!

And yet, Brown builds an uncharacteristically gripping novel that kept me turning the pages, and had me genuinely surprised by the end. This isn’t a bad effort by any means, and probably reaches the uppermost quartile of “mental chewing-gum” novels.

Inferno is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle.

Iain Banks, one of my favourite authors, died earlier this week aged just 59. The world has lost a literary genius. With that in mind, it felt inappropriate to write about any other author’s work this week. This isn’t a proper review, more just a collection of thoughts on Banks’s most famous work.

I’ve never really enjoyed science fiction, but I’m a big fan of most of Iain Bank’s non-scifi novels. The Wasp Factory was his first, and I think probably his greatest (though it’s a close call between this and the rather different Whit).

The Wasp Factory tells the story of Frank, an adolescent living with his eccentric single father on a Scottish island. Frank’s brother is in a psychiatric hospital. Frank himself is, to say the least, severely maladjusted, taking part in bizarre sacrificial rituals of his own making, and expressing negative emotions through extreme violence, and occasionally murder.

It’s a modern Gothic character study, with such evocative description in some scenes that they evoked a physical response in me – and I think this is the only book I’ve ever read which has had that effect. Frank serves as the psychologically flawed first-person narrator, which provides for the deeply disturbing normalisation of grotesque horror, but also for perhaps the darkest and funniest moments of black levity in any of Banks’s books.

This is a novel which really rewards re-reading because of the number of different levels on which it plays, and the number of themes it explores: power and abuse, psychiatric illness, identity, and loneliness to list just some of the more prominent. There is a “big twist” at the end of The Wasp Factory which might discourage re-reading, but, in fact, the knowledge gained from the ending sets out a whole other level for the reader to explore within the narrative. I’ve read it quite a number of times, and have read individual passages even more.

This was also the first book I gave to Wendy, some time before we started dating. In hindsight, it may well be one of the world’s least romantic books, but it evidently didn’t put her off me too much!

The edition I have is also unusual for displaying quotes from reviews that are highly critical of the book, alongside the more positive ones. That felt like a brave yet endearing decision. It’s probably also a fairly successful marketing ploy: I can’t remember a single one of the cover quotes from any other books I’ve read, yet can remember some from this volume which I first read well over a decade ago.

The Wasp Factory is only a couple of hundred pages long, but it’s a couple of hundred pages that’s stayed with me for a long time. If you haven’t read it before, I hope that you will. It stands as testament to the genius of its creator, who will be sorely missed by legions of fans.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

No-one can deny that Margaret Thatcher was a divisive figure. As so often, I’m somewhere in the middle. To me, Thatcher has qualities that one can admire, even if one isn’t supportive – to put it mildly – of everything she did. As an autobiography, it’s wholly unsurprising that it is her positive attributes that tend to shine through here.

It seems a little unfair to compare prime-ministerial autobiographies, but with Tony Blair’s relatively fresh in my mind (review here), it is hard to resist. Poor writing makes Blair’s volume difficult to consume, and it took me well over a year to plod through it in relatively short bursts. In contrast, Thatcher’s is entirely readable, and very enjoyable – bordering on being a page-turner. Thatcher genuinely masters the art of making the reader feel like a close confidant, as though this is a fireside chat in book form. I get the sense that this is what Blair strives to achieve, but fails.

And yet, Thatcher’s contains much more detailed political discussion. While Blair chooses to share his toilet habits, Thatcher writes long and detailed (though defensive) rationales for many of the policies she adopted. To give a single example from their respective autobiographies, I understand much more clearly Thatcher’s argument for defending the Falklands than Blair’s argument for invading Iraq. Where I disagree with Thatcher, I can still follow her line of argument in a way that I cannot even where I agree with Blair.

This set me thinking: perhaps the reason for Thatcher’s clearer explanations is the fact that she defended her policies more often and in greater detail than Blair. The long-form wide-ranging radio and television political interviews in which Thatcher participated simply did not exist in Blair’s day. I think that represents something lost at the heart of modern democracy. But I digress.

It’s worth pointing out that this is an abridged combination of two volumes: The Path to Power and The Downing Street Years. While I haven’t read those two volumes, it seems that the abridgement has largely been handled with skill. There are occasions where the detail of events is noticeably lacking in comparison to others, but these are rare, and don’t distract from the overarching narrative.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Thatcher should write a self-assured autobiography, and it’s no surprise that many will disagree with much of the reasoning contained within. But it is the quality of the writing that stands out here, and that makes this volume worthy of four-star rating.

The Autobiography is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle.

It’s a measure of the brilliance of this book that my first thought having read it was that Steve Jobs was an excellent subject for a biography. He was an exceptionally complex character, who achieved quite phenomenal personal success despite a deeply flawed personality.

His complex personality could have lead to a very confused biography, but it is to Isaacson’s considerable credit that the portrait he paints is entirely clear. And, somehow, Isaacson fashions a somewhat sympathetic character out of a man whose actions were often cruel, and whose personality appears thoroughly unlikeable. Jobs’ gamut of failings run from from minor transgressions of social norms (for example, refusing to wash), via quite astonishing acts of cruelty (for example, refusing to acknowledge that his firstborn daughter was his), to alarming acts of quite alarming idiocy (for example, eating only carrots until he turned orange). Yet somehow, this collection of failings interacted to allow him to lead his businesses to create products of unparalleled perfection.

It’s somewhat disturbing to see people claim to want to emulate Jobs’s “formula for success”. I don’t think it is entirely possible to tease out whether he achieved so much despite his flaws or because of them. Could he still have made his visions reality without declaring people’s work to be “shit” and demanding the impossible of employees under the threat of on-the-spot firing? It’s impossible to know, but we can be certain that emulating such tactics will not result in the same success the majority of the time.

I find it intensely irritating to see people producing lists of “lessons learned” from this biography, which consistently list culturally positive attributes of Jobs’s behaviour (e.g. simplify things), damaging behaviours reframed in a positive light (e.g. build a team of “A players”, without mentioning that Jobs’s interpretation of this includes indiscriminate firing), and omit many of the things to which Jobs himself attributed his success (e.g. frequent use of LSD). It is typical of much of the nonsense in the field of management theory that people, without justification, attribute his success to only those bits of his management style which they find palatable. And it is infuriating.

Away from that brief digression… Whatever conclusions one draws about Jobs from reading this biography, the biography itself is – to use a Jobs phrase – “insanely great”. The 656 pages fly by, and the narrative is as absorbing as any I’ve ever read. It is a character study that combines real detail with forceful narrative drive in a way that few biographies manage, and it comes highly recommended.

Steve Jobs is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle.

Confessions of a Male Nurse is a sequel of sorts to the successful Confessions of a GP, by Benjamin Daniels. It has a broadly similar epistolary structure, which lends itself well to a series of anecdotes on connected themes.

Confessions of a Male Nurse is a volume that may hold particular interest to those interested in comparisons between the NHS and other healthcare systems. The protagonist is trained in New Zealand, and spends much of the book practising there, but also spends some years in the NHS in London. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel that the differences were pulled out very clearly in the narrative, which felt like a lost opportunity.

In both Confessions of a GP and this volume, the protagonists admit some ethically dodgy behaviour. In GP, these felt like genuine dilemmas, and made me appreciate the reasons behind the course of action taken – even when I didn’t agree with them. The confessions in Male Nurse, however, were of a wholly different type. The behaviour of the protagonist often struck me as entirely inappropriate, and the justifications for it were poor. For example, there are several anecdotes in which nursing colleagues are providing wholly substandard care, and causing bodily harm to patients. Our protagonist reasons that, as a bank nurse, he shouldn’t complain or he won’t get work in the institution again. And so, the appalling behaviour continues.

I would like to think that I would not do the same. I’ve never been a bank nurse, but I have been a junior doctor, and I have – particularly when patients have come to harm – reported incidents in which colleagues have made errors. I’ve reported incidents involving senior colleagues on at least two occasions. This isn’t done in a vindictive way. It isn’t done with the intention of assigning guilt. It is done to ensure that incidents in which patients are harmed are fully investigated, and prevented from re-occurring. It may be, for example, that the harm caused to patients in the anecdotes in Male Nurse are not caused by callous individuals, but by a system that is creating dangerous under-staffing, or perhaps by personal issues affecting an individual. Brushing the problem under the carpet and failing to take any action whatsoever perpetuates the problem.

To report such incidents is my duty. I’ve always been aware that doing so might make my life more difficult, and I’ve never done so without discussing it first with the people involved. It made me very uncomfortable to read of someone else protecting themselves before both their patients. But, on the other hand, I guess this is important. If this behaviour is common in hospitals, it is important that we understand it better to prevent it continuing. Perhaps this book shines a light on behaviour that we ought to better understand. Perhaps it offers elucidation of a problem that we should look into further. I’m not sure.

If we put that issue to one side, then the book is quite entertaining. There were moments of frustration where the author’s explanation of diseases and medical procedures were a little out of kilter with reality, but – by and large – the descriptions were pretty good. The narrative structure was a little uncertain, seemingly varying between an epistolary form relating individual anecdotes, and a more formal chronological description of events across chapters, and there were consequently times where I felt a little lost within the narrative superstructure, unsure whether we were in London or New Zealand. But this isn’t a bad book, and I don’t feel it deserves harsh criticism. I’m just not absolutely sure I’d recommend it.

Confessions of a Male Nurse is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

Best Kept Secret is the third book in Jeffrey Archer’s series of indeterminate length, The Clifton Chronicles. I reviewed the first volume, Only Time Will Tell, in September last year and gave it a broadly positive four-star review. In October, I gave the second book, The Sins of the Father, a broadly negative two-star review. Between then and now, Archer has hinted that his quintology might just become a septology or even an octology.

This is a bit surprising, because it feels to me like he’s lost interest. He’s now all but abandoned the idea of multiple intersecting plots told from multiple points of view, and is using a pretty straight narrative. He’s abandoned the exploration of different social settings, contrasting the working class Cliftons with the wealthy Barringtons, and keeps the plot firmly rooted in wealth throughout. He’s abandoned many of the most interesting characters, paying only the briefest visit to the protagonist’s mother, for example. He’s abandoned detailed characterisation, relying on new stereotypical new characters about as deep as the paper on which they’re printed. And he seems to have lost all enthusiasm for driving the plot forward.

This volume picks up precisely where the last left off, and hence starts by resolving the inane cliffhanger about a House of Lords vote which, as discussed at length elsewhere, could never have occurred in the first place. The resolution isn’t immediate. It’s strung out for a quite ludicrous amount of time. And after that, we’re launched back into a tale of increasingly unlikeable people being portrayed as saints, and fighting off attacks from people portrayed as two-dimensional villains, against backgrounds with which Archer is personally very familiar – politics and the law, in the main. The villains’ cause is, as ever, aided by utterly moronic decisions by the saints. But, after things hang in the balance for a while, the resolution favours the saints. Mix in some filler passages with plot of no consequence, rinse, and repeat ad nauseum.

In my last review of this series, I suggested that books in a series should be either: self-contained, with interesting broader arcs between different types volumes; or part of an epic tale, with smaller arcs satisfying the conditions of the publishing format. This volume, even more than the last, fails to fill either of those conditions. There’s barely any semblance left of an arc reaching back to the first volume, and there are no satisfying arcs within this volume alone. Once again, the amount of plot in this volume that actually contributes to moving the story of the series forward is no more than could be summarised in a couple of paragraphs.

Each of my previous reviews of this series has singled out a ludicrous incident within the plot to demonstrate my dissatisfaction. This time, I’m spoilt for choice. I’ll have to plump for the court case in which a will is challenged. According to Archer, the case is on a knife-edge, with the judge unable to decide whether to place more weight on the opinion of a doctor who never met the writer of the will but contests that ill people can never make wills, or a doctor who actually examined the patient. That Archer spins this out for so long, and comes up with an suitably insane resolution in the form of a crossword, just about out-crazies the brazen way in which he adds a bizarre cameo appearance by Princess Margaret… in Argentina. I’m not even joking.

And yet, even that isn’t the craziest thing about this increasingly infuriating series. No, the most insane thing is that, despite it all, I know I’m going to buy the next volume this time next year. And, in the end, that probably says more about this series than any review I can write. And yet, I still can’t bring myself to recommend it.

The infuriating cliffhanger at the end of this volume, which is considerably less well introduced and for which the resolution is many times clearer than in the previous volumes, only adds to my suspicion that the series would be improved by the story skipping a decade or so. I think that would give some hope of reinvigorating the plot, and maybe Archer’s enthusiasm for it. I’ll live in hope.

Best Kept Secret is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle.

Writing this review feels a little strange, almost like reviewing the work of a friend, despite the fact that I’ve never even met Paul Carr. Shortly after the turn of the century, his email newsletter, The Friday Thing, became the first I ever parted with cash to receive. The subscription was something like £10/year, and it was well worth it.

I remember when Carr branched out into publishing, and I bought some of their early publications, including the book of paramedic Tom Reynolds’s blog. I bought some of the Amateur Transplants stuff which they published, too. And then I sort of lost track of Paul’s career, until last year, when I discovered NSFWCorp – and promptly subscribed. It’s clear that he has an uncanny ability to make me part with my hard earned cash.

Bringing Nothing to the Party was published back in 2009, but I’ve only just discovered it. It tells the “inside story”, from Paul’s point of view, of The Friday Thing and its successors, as well as the dotcom bubble as a whole. It’s a very personal autobiographical book, also describing his love life in some excruciating detail.

I like Paul, so I’m probably predisposed to liking this book. And, indeed, I did. I think it’s really well written. By his own admission, at this stage in his life Carr was a bit of an unlikeable idiot, and yet he manages to pull of that brilliant trick of using well-judged self-depreciation and humour to make a thoroughly unlikeable character sympathetic. It’s genuinely funny, and made me laugh out loud at points. And it’s also genuinely insightful. It’s fascinating to read the sort of things that were going on in the tech startup community during these heady days.

This clearly isn’t a heavy-weight, profound, life-changing book, but it has no pretentions in that direction. It’s a short, fun and funny autobiographical tale, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Bringing Nothing to the Party is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.