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the complete review - fiction

Amazing Disgrace

by
James Hamilton-Paterson

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : good fun, great voice

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Cooking with Fernet Branca was a feast of outrageously ornate comic writing and inedible recipes. Amazing Disgrace is more of the same, but somehow less so. (...) Gerald carries an air of self-disgust (not least in an unfunny subplot involving penis enlargement and "empurpled" priapism). At one point, he is offered a huge amount of money to write a second Millie Cleat book. Filled with self-loathing, he at first accepts before finally deciding it's not worth it. Hamilton-Paterson, meanwhile, is a formidable literary writer who had a surprise comic hit, and here he is writing a so-so sequel." - Patrick Ness, The Guardian
  
  
• "Hamilton-Paterson's genius in what must surely become a series lies in the gear-changes in Gerald's accounts of himself. There's room for farce, awful puns (a porn video entitled What-The Butler's Sore ?), non-sequiturs and scabrous prejudice. Every reader will laugh steadily." - Richard Canning, The Independent
  
  
• "(A)nother hilarious saga of misfortunes and misunderstandings. (...) The Gerald Samper sagas (of which a third is apparently in the pipeline) are very different from Hamilton-Paterson’s other novels, with their beautifully transparent prose and enchanted explorations of other worlds (notably, the Philippines). Yet the same elegant, cultivated sensibility is at work here. Hamilton-Paterson, one of our finest prose stylists, is a national treasure; and Amazing Disgrace, though perhaps less uproariously funny than Fernet Branca, is a gorgeous plum pudding of a novel." - Ian Thomson, The Spectator
  
  
• "This second tranche is just as funny (.....) In truth the plot is not the principal pleasure of this book. You do not find yourself hurrying to find out what happens, but rather drifting slowly through, savouring the humour in Gerald's splenetic asides. (...) This is not an important book, but it is bad-tempered good fun and is clever enough to be constantly stimulating." - Toby Clements,Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "Good verbal fun abounds. (...) The book ends in undignified death and destruction. Is this still comedy or something nastier ? Like the face that Millie thinks she sees on the sea bed, it all depends on the angle you’re looking from." - Tom Deveson, Sunday Times
  
  
• "One problem with a dislikeable narrator is that, if he is presented too convincingly, we have a dislikeable novel. (...) A more serious flaw is the novel's lack of plot. It relies for everything on the emotional wreck that is Gerald, and that proves insufficient. (...) Amazing Disgrace is something of a let-down." - Simon Baker, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Amazing Disgrace continues the story of professional ghostwriter Gerald Samper from Cooking with Fernet Branca. He's still living in his out-of-the-way Italian home and while neighbour Marta seems to have disappeared for good when things pick up, that's only one less irritant for Gerald, who seems to be drawn to irritation like moths to a flame (and with similar results). He is still ghostwriting -- the most recent project being the memoir of a one-armed grandmother who has set all sorts of sailing records -- as ghastly a person as all of Gerald's pop-culture subjects are. And, yes, he is also still cooking as creatively as ever: the book begins with the vindaloo blancmage ("an intriguing marriage of the incandescent and the gelid") he had for lunch sitting about as well as one would imagine.
       One-armed Millie Cleat's memoir needs a few last touches -- she's discovered her spiritual side -- and as usual Gerald is displeased that, soon to reach a milestone birthday (forty, he claims at first, but as someone points out: "I always thought you came on a bit world-weary for a stripling of forty"), he's still writing about sporting heroes (and specifically writing the nonsense he has to about them):

My books are nothing but cunningly crafted lies, yet avoid being honest fiction.

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Links:

• Faber publicity page
• Europa editions publicity page
• Profile in The Observer

• The Australian
• Boston Globe
• Cleveland Plain Dealer
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Sunday Telegraph
• Sunday Times

• Profile in The Guardian

• Cooking with Fernet Branca
• Rancid Pansies

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction
• See Index of Series and Sequels under review

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About the Author:

       British author James Hamilton-Paterson was born in 1941. He lives in Austria.

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© 2006-2011 the complete review

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