Robert MacLean

Robert MacLean is a Canadian-born novelist, playwright and filmmaker, now an Irish citizen and expat living in Greece. These facts alone struck me and made me curious as to what he had to say, how a filmmaker writes fiction, or a novelist makes films, and a cosmopolitan one at that, and whether the resulting products bear further investigation. I have not seen any of his films, although the trailer to his "Emma Blue" certainly looks intriguing, and I would watch it if it were available.

"Will show more You Please Fuck Off?" is the latest in a series of e-book novels featuring the jaded but likable protagonist Toby Tucker, who has a fondness for a parvenu lifestyle but can't seem to help getting tripped up in all manner of farcical situations. In fact the book is a collection of two novellas and three short stories, the most substantial being the novella of the book's title that takes up the last third. "Will You Please" is the meatiest of the stories. It's not an easy narrative to summarize, since so much of the telling involves affect and attitude, verbal wars and nervous dialogues, that I'm not always sure what is actually happening, apart from involving the pursuit of a wealthy Englishwoman named Marcie, the tribulations of trying to get a foot in her wealthy circle (which includes the Queen of England), and the humiliations of getting booted out of it, all the while fending off a homosexual with a crush on Toby and contending with a Chinese female prostitute disguised as a psychotherapist who practices S/M. As I have yet to read the other books in the series I will forbear on a more comprehensive evaluation, but this latest publication is self-contained enough to stand on its own and seems to offer a nice taste of his oeuvre. It is good enough at least to motivate me to start at the beginning with the first Toby Tucker novel Foreign Matter: In Trouble with My Fantasies (The Toby Series).

The other novella, "Certainly Something," is a hilarious account of an eccentric group of loopy tourists in Athens who barely sidestep one disaster after another, despite the efforts of their tour guide, the same Toby Tucker. The titles of the shorter stories, "The Fat Girls Contest," "Attack of the Giant Feminists," and "The Great Detective" hint at their content, and I will not spoil the fun except to say they serve up excellent satire. MacLean's is a wry, sophisticated voice and may not be for everyone. He writes as if the Political Correctness regime of the last few decades never or shouldn't have happened, though he tends to avoid vulgarity and offense, even as the Marquis de Sade is obviously a major influence. If "Giant Feminists" might irk some readers for its hostile spoofing of a stereotype, his other male characters display an earnest, almost celebratory sexual penchant for obese women.

A smarmy democratic or egalitarian world view you will not find here, as there is an almost shameless (if ironic) embrace of the aristocracy and its tastes, mirrored in a richly polished prose, which refuses to say anything profound but plays on the surface like light on jewelry but is nonetheless highly seductive and laser-sharp: "The pouch under his chin palpated as he waited, if you could speak of his having a chin. A mouth was what he had, a wide mouth that seemed to end at his shoulders and gave him a calculating look. A let's-wait-and-see look." I suppose this is how the filmic or cinematographic quality of MacLean's writing manifests itself, in the sensuous movement from sentence to sentence as from visual image to image. This is the type of writing that can be read aloud - and re-read - with pleasure. The danger of an excessive preoccupation with the particular and the sensual, with texture, is that the reader can easily lose track of the whole, and I have to confess having only elusive impressions upon finishing these stories, a lingering effect of mere style rather than truth or depth of meaning or complex human predicaments. Yet it's an assured and consistently wrought style, and that's the most important thing for me - a distinctive voice. The acid test of literary writing is that it not only invites re-reading, the second reading I predict will be a superior experience, where the trees recede and the forest comes into view. show less

Insubstantial mental wanderings of a non-intellectual, self indulgent plodder through life. Don't see any plan or future and characters are quirky but not interesting. Reading this was a waste of time, should have known better based on the title. I'm really too old to continue to fall for this transparent promotions. Hope I learn something from this experience with self published drivel. Enough said!