Book notes - Love Will Tear us Apart, by C.K. McDonnell

RichardAbbott

I was not so sure about Love Will Tear us Apart, by C.K. McDonnell. It's fairly pacy and I was never at risk of giving up, but on the other hand I don't think I will remember much about it in a little while.

Some details: judging by the blurb it's the third in a series based on the investigative activities of a newspaper dedicated to the paranormal (The Stranger Times). The various staff are all, in their several ways, anywhere between mildly and seriously weird. However, they are good-hearted, and seemingly engaged in a very long war against The Enemy, who go by the name of The Founders (but are unrelated to the Star Trek Deep Space Nine shape-shifters of that name). The paper itself is based in Manchester, and all the action takes place in and around said city. In the book there is a small cluster of related paranormal problems which all end up tying together via a kind of New Age retreat centre, which (naturally) turns out to be a front for The Founders. (I guess this paragraph highlights that the book seems to borrow lots of ideas and names from other works, even if they are changed and adapted to a different purpose here).

Part of the problem I had was precisely that it was the third book, and it's kind of taken for granted that you know most of the characters and their back-stories. I don't think it's a series that lends itself to leaping in part-way through - I sort-of assumed that I was supposed to identify with and care about the newspaper staff, and that pretty much everyone else was on the Dark Side, but there's not a lot of early stuff in the book that helps you make this choice. In fact, while you are indeed supposed to root for the staff, not everyone else turns out to be wickedly motivated - but most of them are! It feels like C.K. McDonnell has kind of settled down into his series and is basically writing now for his fans.

So there was a constant sense of listening to an in-joke that you didn't quite follow and weren't sure how to respond to. The writing itself is plain but competent - you wouldn't read it for splendid prose, but it held together well and carried the plot along. The characters don't really change or develop much - like a long-running TV show they kind of repeat the same themes and tropes that one suspects they have already done for two books. I think that C.K. McDonnell is hoping to be another of the memorable writers who blend comedy with fantasy - he has been in his time an actual stand-up comic - but at least in this book I don't think he's quite got it right. It has a slightly slapstick air about it, and I think he was aiming for a kind of Only Fools and Horses feel (there's even a Reliant Robin - for non-UK readers, a classic but idiosyncratic kind of three-wheeler), but for me it didn't quite work.

Who would like it? I think probably you'd have to be already into the series to fully appreciate what's going on, and I don't think it's as accessible as an entry point as (I think) he believes.