Matt Thorne

This was not something I would normally pick up since it looked like the male equivalent of chick lit. Which is what: Lad rag? Homme tome? Dude book?
But I was intrigued by the fact that it was longlisted for the Man Booker prize, and that Calvino, Schnitzler and Kafka were bandied about in one review.
As it turned out, I finished Cherry in 2 days. It was easy to read and Thorne had set up an intriguing premise which kept one engaged till the end. The protagonist, Steve Ellis, is a teacher who show more has had a long dry spell in the romance department. All this changes when a representative from Your Perfect Woman shows up on his doorstep and promises Steve his perfect woman. Steve eventually meets her and she is as he specified, down to the name ‘Cherry.’ Questions of who Cherry is and what Your Perfect Woman is exactly soon give way to darker questions of how far one is willing to go for love, or even the illusion of it.
Nothing is fully revealed beyond a tantalizing coda, which keeps the mystery lingering after the book ends. show less

Matt Thorne's Prince bio is a very personal account. Which is inevitable in a music book: what one person sees as a masterpiece, another dismisses as trite. And for a while the book does manage to find a balance between facts and opinion, even though the tale he tells is vastly uneven, often going deep into flimsy material while almost skipping over Prince's career highlights.

It's understandable that he rushes through the 1980s, since that period is covered in numerous other books (most show more importantly Per Nilsen's unsurpassed "Dance Music Sex Romance -- Prince: The First Decade"). But after completing the book I felt that he had an ulterior motive: propping up Prince's vastly inferior output from the second half of the 1990s and onwards. It doesn't help that numerous pages deal with an in-depth account of every concert and aftershow of Prince's "21 Nights" run in London.

Thorne has interviewed many of the "usual suspects", the dozen or so former band members and other associates who have told their side of the story plenty of times in the past two decades or so. It is disappointing that after all this time so many of the other friends/employees still remain unwilling to open up.

The only real surprising eye witness is Hans-Martin Buff, an engineer who worked with Prince during the 1990s. He provides insight into a period that so far has remained somewhat under-reported, but Thorne is too eager to extrapolate Buff's testimony to the whole of Prince's career, when it should be clear that Prince's working habits have shifted somewhat.

There are some jarring theories in the book. Thorne seems eager to dismiss the tracklists of unreleased projects as merely snapshots, when his is already clear to any Prince-fan who cares to use his head: if there are half a dozen known tracklists for a single project, it stands to reason that perhaps we should not regard these as set in stone.

The book also wildly hops throughout time, and fails to tell a linear and consistent story. One moment you're reading about a late-1990s Prince album, and the next Thorne is discussing Carmen Electra's album from years earlier. I can understand the urge to group side projects into separate chapters, but in the end it just doesn't work.

In the end, Thorne is too much of a fan. It is telling that he dismisses Kevin Smith's legendary tale of his weeklong documentary filming at Paisley Park, while this account is absolutely consistent with numerous other stories about Prince (which also remain unmentioned in the book). It is far from a must-read, and the best thing that can happen to it is if someone enters Buff's information into the Princevault website and this book is mentioned in a footnote as the source. show less

One for fans, well actually I am a fan but this book does not do it for me. It is primarily focused on his music, and avoids the personal details, gossip and scandal. Which is fine, indeed it is a good approach to adopt. Prince was undoubtedly a genius (and a loon) who produced a wonderful body of genre-defying music from 1979 to 1991 and the odd valuable piece thereafter. Others will dispute the peak period and the merits of later work. The story of the early music formation is interesting, show more and encouraged me to seek out and listen to the b-sides. But the text gets tiresome as the author becomes a critical fanboy appraising the worth of every track (with some very dubious conclusions of the merits of later work). Main problem though it is just bloody boring, and the writing is at best functional but more often unimaginative and self-regarding. Which definitely does not do justice to Prince! show less

Steve Ellis is a 33 year English Teacher, who doesn't like English, or indeed teaching. He has practically no social life, hasn't had a girlfriend for 12 years and his home is literally starting to fall apart. But his luck seems to change when he encounters a seemingly harmless old man in a pub and shares a drink with him. Before long, an acquaintance of the old man turns up on Steve's doorstep, and asks him about his perfect woman - down to every last detail. Circumstances then land Steve show more in a hotel bar, where his perfect woman, who fulfills every criteria he specified - even down to her name, Cherry - walks into his life. At first he is suspicious about the whole matter, but before long he realises that he is so happy to have his ideal girlfriend that he stops caring about who Cherry really is, or where she came from. However, Steve eventually comes to realise that if he wants to hold on to the beautiful Cherry, there may be a very high price to pay.

This book seemed to start out in one direction, and then quickly veer off into another. Initially it appeared that it was going to be an amusing tale about one of life's eccentrics, but then it seemed to almost turn into a sci-fi morality tale.

It's narrated by Steve himself, which means that we only ever get to see things from his point of view, and how reliable his point of view is, is something to consider. On the plus side, the action moved quickly and it was engaging and entertaining fare - on the whole a fairly undemanding read. The chapters are short and this is a book that can be read and enjoyed in just one or two sittings.

However, on the downside, it all seemed just a little bit too unbelieveable. I could never really get too carried away with what was going to happen, because I felt certain that there would be ridiculously absurd ending (whether I was right or not is something that I won't give away). Also, most of the other characters in the book are very one dimensional, and it is hard to really care about any of them. Cherry herself is seemingly devoid of any character and seems rather a boring person, even from Steve's point of view. I must say though that I rather suspected that Cherry's lack of character was somehow part of the point.

At just under 200 pages, this story has the feel of a modern fable, and the somewhat ambiguous ending will leave you thinking. show less