None
3 stars
Many years ago I worked on a small press magazine called Cobweb which published a poem by Toby Litt. Several years later, he has become a novelist with four books to his credit.
Whoever (one of Amazon's reviewers) said Corpsing was a literary equivalent of the 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' wannabe films that have sprouted like a forest of diseased exit wounds in this city of ours in the last couple of years was right; but that isn't all of it. Corpsing is also halfway to American Psycho in its substitution of designer gear for actual characterisation. Conrad (yes, it's the Heart of Darkness, the horror! the horror!) is a hollow sham; he claims emotion, indeed emotes all over the bloody place all the time, and à la Tony Parsons whinges on about how women are better than men until you want to give him a kick up …
Many years ago I worked on a small press magazine called Cobweb which published a poem by Toby Litt. Several years later, he has become a novelist with four books to his credit.
Whoever (one of Amazon's reviewers) said Corpsing was a literary equivalent of the 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' wannabe films that have sprouted like a forest of diseased exit wounds in this city of ours in the last couple of years was right; but that isn't all of it. Corpsing is also halfway to American Psycho in its substitution of designer gear for actual characterisation. Conrad (yes, it's the Heart of Darkness, the horror! the horror!) is a hollow sham; he claims emotion, indeed emotes all over the bloody place all the time, and à la Tony Parsons whinges on about how women are better than men until you want to give him a kick up the arse.
Unfortunately this attempt to disembowel the genre thriller and dispose with suspense in favour of emoting doesn't really work for me; for any book to send up a genre it has to be part of that genre (viz. Terry Pratchett, who sends up Fantasy by writing novels that are 100% Fantasy novels as well) and not hang off the genre like a parasite. The sexual detail at least varies from occasion to occasion which is more than can be said for Stewart Home's sex scenes (how to write a novel by S. Home: the same sex scene on half the pages and it's 50% done), but it didn't do anything for me except wonder if Toby is the secret son of David Cronenberg, such is his horror of the body.