A review by mindthewolves
The Great & Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms: How One Man Scorched the Twentieth Century But Didn't Mean To by Ian Thornton

1.0

I picked this up because the premise sounded so promising. For the first fifty pages, I was pretty happy – and then the voice began to grate on me. It’s the sort of humorous, irreverent voice that is fun to read in short stories (i.e. in small doses), but in longer narratives it’s too opaque and makes it difficult to be invested in the characters. Also, as the main character grows up, the narrative voice becomes increasingly and gratuitously crass. It’s not the sexual content so much as the way in which it was done that bothered me – everything was filtered through the male gaze, and there was so much objectification of women. On top of that, despite the set-up as an epic of sorts, nothing happens in the book; the main character takes up an itinerant life, moving from indistinguishable place to indistinguishable place and picking up sidekicks and dogs on the way, but there is no direction or momentum to any of it. The sheer tedium lost this book a star for every hundred pages.

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