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A review by dave_holwill
Villager by Tom Cox
5.0
Truly remarkable.
To put all my cards on the table here, I did not really enjoy Help The Witch as much as I've enjoyed Tom's other work and I worried that I would not enjoy this either. I had a terrible feeling I might not like his fiction. However, this is not true, it is just confirmation that I don't like short stories, no matter who writes them.
Villager is a work of brilliance. Tom has clearly spent a lot of time working up to this, strands of his previous nature writing are evident, as is his deep love of Devon, his adopted home county.
The narrative leaps from past to future to present in a David Mitchellesque fashion, but with better jokes, and a little more reverence for musical history. Indeed, if you're not right on the money with your knowledge of late '60s counterculture then you'll need to use Google a bit to figure out which of the artists referenced are real and which figments of Tom's vivid imagination.
Spanning the centuries and with an interconnected cast of misfits, Underhill is a village you'll wish was real, and that you could stay the hell away from.
It's not often I feel the need to go back and reread a book these days, but after finishing this, I had a niggling urge to go back and read it again with all the things I know now that I didn't at the start.
To put all my cards on the table here, I did not really enjoy Help The Witch as much as I've enjoyed Tom's other work and I worried that I would not enjoy this either. I had a terrible feeling I might not like his fiction. However, this is not true, it is just confirmation that I don't like short stories, no matter who writes them.
Villager is a work of brilliance. Tom has clearly spent a lot of time working up to this, strands of his previous nature writing are evident, as is his deep love of Devon, his adopted home county.
The narrative leaps from past to future to present in a David Mitchellesque fashion, but with better jokes, and a little more reverence for musical history. Indeed, if you're not right on the money with your knowledge of late '60s counterculture then you'll need to use Google a bit to figure out which of the artists referenced are real and which figments of Tom's vivid imagination.
Spanning the centuries and with an interconnected cast of misfits, Underhill is a village you'll wish was real, and that you could stay the hell away from.
It's not often I feel the need to go back and reread a book these days, but after finishing this, I had a niggling urge to go back and read it again with all the things I know now that I didn't at the start.