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A review by phwoooarker
The Best of Adam Sharp by Graeme Simsion
2.0
This review is also published here: http://theslattern.com/2017/04/12/the-best-of-adam-sharp/
At some points in this book I got the feeling that I was reading an early draft rather than a finished novel. It had all the components but they didn’t quite hang together.
I feel bad for authors whose debut novels are wildly successful – they spend years perfecting their first book, it’s well-received, and then they find themselves under pressure from agents, publishers and their new fans to crank out another bestseller ASAP. At least Simsion had a buffer after the wild success of The Rosie Project
– he was able to write a light-hearted sequel with the same characters.
The Best of Adam Sharp
is the real second novel though – the one with a new cast of characters, a new tone and new scenario. Unfortunately, it seems that the temptation to rush the ‘difficult second novel’ was too much, and the finished product feels slapdash and hurried.
In the same vein as Nick Hornby and David Nicholls, Simsion explores the mind of the middle-aged, straight, white man who feels he hasn’t quite reached his full potential. Adam Sharp, now nearing fifty, is a well-paid part-time freelance database architect and amateur pianist/singer. He has a loving and supportive partner, although after 20 years together some of the passion has inevitably left their relationship. Despite his relatively privileged life, Adam can’t get over a three-month-long love affair he had a quarter of a century earlier with an Australian soap actress. So when the women in question, Angelina, gets back in touch from her seemingly settled married life, Adam is thrown into a tailspin. He leaves his home and his partner and goes to meet Angelina in a cottage in the south of France, not quite sure what to expect from their rekindled acquaintance.
The structure of the story wasn’t hugely compelling. Almost the whole first half of the book is set back in the late 1980s during the few months that Adam and Angelina were lovers. While the relationship was outlined in rather minute detail, there was nothing particularly remarkable about it; it seemed to be based mostly on garden variety mutual lust rather than any actual compatibility. It was also rather short-lived. A lot of text is given over to Adam’s regrets that he left Angelina back in Australia, but it’s unclear quite why he did it. He was a young IT contractor who had a job in New Zealand and he didn’t want to break his contract, and because of that I had no real sympathy for his pining after her 25 years later. They weren’t torn asunder by a cruel and heartless world – he just cared more about a crappy contracting job than he did about her. It’s like saying ‘you’re the love of my life but I have to leave you because I’m expected on my paper round’. Granted, Adam seems to realise later that he’d made a mistake, but really, how stupid can you get?
I also didn’t buy Angelina’s character. She’s a stunning blonde soap actress with a gorgeous singing voice – a bog standard male fantasy figure – but that really is all there is to her. She wasn’t particularly nice and often came across as a bit of a drip. She was basically just a trophy girlfriend; not the kind of person you could write a great love story about.
Something else which didn’t really work for me was the musical motif. The idea was that Adam and Angelina bonded over their shared love of music, but describing music in books is always fraught with difficulties, and conveying that certain type of trainspotter-ish obsessiveness that some people get about music trivia and lore is even more difficult. Nick Hornby pulled it off with aplomb in High Fidelity
, but here it was nowhere near as smoothly done.
Detracting from the believability as well was that this book appealed – uncritically - to the worst excesses of romanticism. The notion that a gap-year fling, cut short because of a junior database architecture contract, could have obsessed and distracted two people for half their lives, seemed a bit far-fetched. This was particularly the case for Angelina, who had model-like good looks – what exactly did she see in Adam other than the fact that he wasn’t emotionally abusive like her previous partner? At times, the whole thing felt like nothing more than a middle-aged man’s fantasy.
Finally, there were a fair few Alan Partridge-esque asides which seem to have been included in complete seriousness but which are hilarious for the mundanity:
“I offered to work from home three days a week to ease pressure on office space. Nigel got his desk back and I passed the savings in train fares back to my client”
I really enjoyed Simsion’s previous books, so I hope that now the difficult (real) second novel is out of the way, there will be a return to form.
(With thanks to the publisher for providing me with an ARC in return for an honest review)
At some points in this book I got the feeling that I was reading an early draft rather than a finished novel. It had all the components but they didn’t quite hang together.
I feel bad for authors whose debut novels are wildly successful – they spend years perfecting their first book, it’s well-received, and then they find themselves under pressure from agents, publishers and their new fans to crank out another bestseller ASAP. At least Simsion had a buffer after the wild success of The Rosie Project
– he was able to write a light-hearted sequel with the same characters.The Best of Adam Sharp
is the real second novel though – the one with a new cast of characters, a new tone and new scenario. Unfortunately, it seems that the temptation to rush the ‘difficult second novel’ was too much, and the finished product feels slapdash and hurried.In the same vein as Nick Hornby and David Nicholls, Simsion explores the mind of the middle-aged, straight, white man who feels he hasn’t quite reached his full potential. Adam Sharp, now nearing fifty, is a well-paid part-time freelance database architect and amateur pianist/singer. He has a loving and supportive partner, although after 20 years together some of the passion has inevitably left their relationship. Despite his relatively privileged life, Adam can’t get over a three-month-long love affair he had a quarter of a century earlier with an Australian soap actress. So when the women in question, Angelina, gets back in touch from her seemingly settled married life, Adam is thrown into a tailspin. He leaves his home and his partner and goes to meet Angelina in a cottage in the south of France, not quite sure what to expect from their rekindled acquaintance.
The structure of the story wasn’t hugely compelling. Almost the whole first half of the book is set back in the late 1980s during the few months that Adam and Angelina were lovers. While the relationship was outlined in rather minute detail, there was nothing particularly remarkable about it; it seemed to be based mostly on garden variety mutual lust rather than any actual compatibility. It was also rather short-lived. A lot of text is given over to Adam’s regrets that he left Angelina back in Australia, but it’s unclear quite why he did it. He was a young IT contractor who had a job in New Zealand and he didn’t want to break his contract, and because of that I had no real sympathy for his pining after her 25 years later. They weren’t torn asunder by a cruel and heartless world – he just cared more about a crappy contracting job than he did about her. It’s like saying ‘you’re the love of my life but I have to leave you because I’m expected on my paper round’. Granted, Adam seems to realise later that he’d made a mistake, but really, how stupid can you get?
I also didn’t buy Angelina’s character. She’s a stunning blonde soap actress with a gorgeous singing voice – a bog standard male fantasy figure – but that really is all there is to her. She wasn’t particularly nice and often came across as a bit of a drip. She was basically just a trophy girlfriend; not the kind of person you could write a great love story about.
Something else which didn’t really work for me was the musical motif. The idea was that Adam and Angelina bonded over their shared love of music, but describing music in books is always fraught with difficulties, and conveying that certain type of trainspotter-ish obsessiveness that some people get about music trivia and lore is even more difficult. Nick Hornby pulled it off with aplomb in High Fidelity
, but here it was nowhere near as smoothly done.Detracting from the believability as well was that this book appealed – uncritically - to the worst excesses of romanticism. The notion that a gap-year fling, cut short because of a junior database architecture contract, could have obsessed and distracted two people for half their lives, seemed a bit far-fetched. This was particularly the case for Angelina, who had model-like good looks – what exactly did she see in Adam other than the fact that he wasn’t emotionally abusive like her previous partner? At times, the whole thing felt like nothing more than a middle-aged man’s fantasy.
Finally, there were a fair few Alan Partridge-esque asides which seem to have been included in complete seriousness but which are hilarious for the mundanity:
“I offered to work from home three days a week to ease pressure on office space. Nigel got his desk back and I passed the savings in train fares back to my client”
I really enjoyed Simsion’s previous books, so I hope that now the difficult (real) second novel is out of the way, there will be a return to form.
(With thanks to the publisher for providing me with an ARC in return for an honest review)