It's all a little Robert Rankin for my tastes, and I don't intend that as a compliment.
And, to make up for yesterday's non-posting, here's a review of me being slightly disappointed by something.
As much as I hesitate to use the phrase, Shaun Micallef is generally seen a “TV funnyman”. It’s a description that undercuts his sharp and non-mainstream sense of humour. Having read his first novella, it’s a job description I wouldn’t mind him sticking too for a little while longer.
In Preincarnate, Micallef aims for witty and settles for zany. This is a jauntily-paced and moderately endearing story of a man who, having been murdered in the 21st century and reincarnated into the body of Oliver Cromwell’s son, tries to go into the future (er, present) to stop his murder from occurring in the first place. It’s certainly smile-inducing in many place, but nothing that develops into actual laughter. It may be that Micallef's bon mots work so well on mainstream TV because they're not like anything around him - he stands out as bizarre and different, and I am surprised by the fact that TV executives understand him enough to keep him around. But, containing that humour to a story means you don't have that counter-point, and what you're left with is a story suffering from characters that don’t engage, a plot doesn’t fire along sufficiently, and asides that, funny as they may have been when writing them down, come across as a little thin in print. I don't know, I'll probably re-read this soon and find it holds up better than I remember. But, combing my memory of it now, I recall turning the final pages and thinking 'eh, it's okay, I guess'.
True story: I have stood next to Shaun Micallef on a train for approximately two minutes.
As much as I hesitate to use the phrase, Shaun Micallef is generally seen a “TV funnyman”. It’s a description that undercuts his sharp and non-mainstream sense of humour. Having read his first novella, it’s a job description I wouldn’t mind him sticking too for a little while longer.
In Preincarnate, Micallef aims for witty and settles for zany. This is a jauntily-paced and moderately endearing story of a man who, having been murdered in the 21st century and reincarnated into the body of Oliver Cromwell’s son, tries to go into the future (er, present) to stop his murder from occurring in the first place. It’s certainly smile-inducing in many place, but nothing that develops into actual laughter. It may be that Micallef's bon mots work so well on mainstream TV because they're not like anything around him - he stands out as bizarre and different, and I am surprised by the fact that TV executives understand him enough to keep him around. But, containing that humour to a story means you don't have that counter-point, and what you're left with is a story suffering from characters that don’t engage, a plot doesn’t fire along sufficiently, and asides that, funny as they may have been when writing them down, come across as a little thin in print. I don't know, I'll probably re-read this soon and find it holds up better than I remember. But, combing my memory of it now, I recall turning the final pages and thinking 'eh, it's okay, I guess'.
True story: I have stood next to Shaun Micallef on a train for approximately two minutes.