Necrophenia

Hmmm. Maybe I am getting old and losing my sense of humour, but I just didn't find this at all funny - or, for that matter, even engaging.

When I turned 50, I adopted the Nancy Pearl rule for book reading. She says: 'If you're fifty years old or younger, give every book fifty pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up. If you're over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100. The result is the number of pages you should read before deciding'. Don't know why I didn't give it up somewhere in chapter 10 - at the mid 40 pages mark. I guess I wanted to give Rankin the benefit of the doubt, as I found some of his earlier stuff really funny. In the end, I forced myself to read it show more through to the end - after the first hundred pages, really just to get it off my bedside table.

Can't remember who used the great put down 'that's not writing, it is typing' but it could have been about this. Alternatively, it could be an example of giving a monkey a typewriter and eventually it will type Shakespeare; and stopping it long before the end is acheived. Or maybe Rankin just keeps writing and every now and then sends stuff off to the publisher.

Whatever, this didn't do it for me. show less

'The boy has a point there,' said my mother, who, I must say, in praise of her loving humanity, hated to see my father laying about me with his belt.
She always thought he went far too easy on me and would have much preferred to have done the job herself.
There were some times when I actually wished that we did not live in the enlightened times of the nineteen-sixties, but back in Mediaeval days.
Because in those days I could have denounced my mother as a witch.

Tyler and his schoolfriends form a rock band called the Sumerian Kynges during the 1960s, playing ukeleles because they are the only instruments that have not been stolen from the school's music room. their first gig is stolen from them by the Rolling Stones, who happen to go to the show more same school, and Tyler's life goes from bad to worse. His whole life is being manipulated by a music who manager who isn't what he seems, he loses years of his life to amnesia and a coma, he never manages to get laid, and when being a rock star doesn't work out he becomes a private detective, in the mould of the great Lazlo Woodbine. But Tyler does almost save the world, and but being able to play the ukelele comes in handy when he discovers a tribe of golden-skinned George Formby worshippers living below a disused subway station in New York.

It's several weeks since I finished it, and as usual with Robert Rankin's books, it all seems quite confusing in retrospect, although I'm sure it more or less made sense at the time. Not one of my favourites. show less

Rankin is working at full chaos in Necrophenia, throwing anything and everything at the wall and using it whether it sticks or not. It's a bit overwhelming, and maddening, and it must be said that Rankin does get on one's nerves occasionally. But there's a lot of insane creativity on display, and as unbridled as Rankin gets, at least he's not boring.

It's all well and good to appreciate your fans, but Necrophenia is almost too insular, punishing the reader for being unfamiliar. It does work on its own, but an appreciation of Rankin's previous work (particularly the eight-volume-and-counting Brentford Trilogy) will go a long way toward alleviating the mass confusion.

Find the full review here.

Necrophenia has all the elements of a classic Rankin novel. Elvis, Lazlo Woodbine, timetravel, running gags, all-pervasive evil and a protagonist without a clue. And yet it feels like all the elements were put into a blender to produce something smelling of bananas, but tasting like lemon. I mean, I *like* lemon, but it's an odd taste to accompany the smell. Yeah. Well, the long and short of it is that it's enjoyable, it's comfortable and it's definitely Rankin, but it doesn't compare to some of the The Brentford Trilogy books or the likes of Sprout Mask Replica. If you like cross-dressing undead, evil Keith Crossbar, Elvis, the Sumerian Kynges, Lazlo Woodbine and cities of solid gold, come on down and have some fun!

Not the best book by Rankin, he seems to have gotten less funny with age, though his ability to go off on amazing tangents that don't interrupt the plot, rather they contribute by the end, hasn't fainted away at all. However, his lyric writing abilities seems to be on par with the best and any mention of George Formby wins triple thumbs up. And zombies. It was still highly amusing and his wicked sense of running gags was on top form here, but I wouldn't suggest reading this one as a starter for Rankin, try The Brightonomicon (which gets a reference in here, too, as does the man himself. Rankin knows how to self promote better than anyone, O master of Far-fetched Fiction that he is).

A bizarrely interesting theory of life after death drives this work of truly far-fetched fiction. So one in every three people living is actually dead... that would explain a lot. Not a brain-eating zombie story, this story verges on the very plausible, which is much more frightening.

Not one of my favourite Robert Rankin novels, but it does pose some interesting questions to ponder.

Far-fetched Fiction at its far-fetchest.