thecommonswings 's review for:

The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee

2.0

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What a wildly annoying and frustrating book this is. It’s not bad per se, but it’s deeply plodding and uninspired and at no point justifies why Lee is doing this as a Bildungsroman rather than, you know, just as a biography. All the best bits are the biographical bits and there’s a dawning, slightly awful, realisation that the main reason why Lee is doing this as a novel is because he can’t be arsed to do his research. Why bother with such things as looking up events and evidence and discussing them with intelligence and thoughtfulness when you can lazily frame it as a trudging, boring historical novel? And quick, write it it in a slightly stilted passive voice and remove quotation marks so it looks a bit modernist and the lads from Granta will lap it up. No. Not for me