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toni's review against another edition
2.0
I’ve been working on reading 20th Century distopian books, and this one fit that category as well as being a du Maurier I hadn’t read yet. It was her last novel, published in 1972.
It’s got a great premise: Britain pulls a Brexit, discovers it can’t survive on its own, so America comes to the rescue, forming a new nation called USUK and vowing to turn the country’s economy around by turning England into a kitschy theme park for American tourists. And then things go wrong.
It’s scathingly anti-American, which was fun to read, but there’s little else to enjoy. It felt way too long, and though there’s a lot of things happening, it feels badly paced. There are too many characters and not a lot of atmosphere, suspense or tension which are the best part of du Maurier’s other books. I imagine, like one of the main characters in the book, she was formidable in her later years and wouldn’t play nicely with an editor. If that character is in fact her proxy, then the ending of her final novel is especially interesting.
Oddly, while in the middle of reading this I listened to an interview with Julian Barnes who mentioned a book of his own called England, England which sounds strikingly similar to this. So I’ll have to check that out.
It’s got a great premise: Britain pulls a Brexit, discovers it can’t survive on its own, so America comes to the rescue, forming a new nation called USUK and vowing to turn the country’s economy around by turning England into a kitschy theme park for American tourists. And then things go wrong.
It’s scathingly anti-American, which was fun to read, but there’s little else to enjoy. It felt way too long, and though there’s a lot of things happening, it feels badly paced. There are too many characters and not a lot of atmosphere, suspense or tension which are the best part of du Maurier’s other books. I imagine, like one of the main characters in the book, she was formidable in her later years and wouldn’t play nicely with an editor. If that character is in fact her proxy, then the ending of her final novel is especially interesting.
Oddly, while in the middle of reading this I listened to an interview with Julian Barnes who mentioned a book of his own called England, England which sounds strikingly similar to this. So I’ll have to check that out.
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