About the reviewer: MICHAEL LEGAT

After a highly successful career in publishing, mostly as Editorial Director firstly of Corgi Books and later of Cassell, Michael Legat became a full-time writer and tutor of Creative Writing. He has published five novels and eighteen non-fiction books, the latter including the Best Sellers An Author's Guide to Publishing and Writing for Pleasure and Profit.

Website: http://www.bookends.clara.net/


FLASHBACK

E. Christopherson

This novel has a lively opening, and after the intriguing first sentence, the short paragraphs sort of bounce the reader along so that it is easy to turn the pages. Too much bounce? Perhaps a little – it's a bit like reading one of Britain's popular downmarket newspapers, which cater for a readership incapable of taking in more than five or six words in a sentence and a maximum of two sentences in a paragraph. Well, it's nowhere near as bad as that, but I don't think it would hurt to reduce the speed a little by joining some sentences and paragraphs together, and I shall have more to say on this score later.
The chapter endings are well contrived to keep the reader interested, and in general it is clear that you feel in control of the material and know where you are going with it. That doesn't mean, of course, that it works entirely satisfactorily (at least, not in my view) – more later on that too.
Apart from Gordo, who is strongly characterised, the people who appear in the extract I have seen are pretty much cardboard figures, but that is of no consequence since they are clearly not going to play more than the most minor of roles in the story.
There is good variety and rhythm in the choice of words, and although you use a vocabulary and images some of which may be unfamiliar to a reader on this side of the Atlantic (bangs, pecker, the nurse's uniform, etc), the meaning is always clear, and the dialogue sounds natural and mostly advances the story.
At the end of the extract you ask whether this is a story that I'd like to read. My answer to your challenge is a rather unenthusiastic 'yes', and there are three reasons why I am a bit doubtful about it.
Firstly, you have swept me along so far, leaving me with lots of questions (the same questions of course that are in Gordo's mind), and that's good – those unanswered questions would normally keep me reading. But your synopsis tells me that you are aiming at producing a satire on Gordo's world both in the 1970s and the present day, and I don't know to what extent I am going to be interested in a satire which I suspect will be very much oriented to the United States. Although some of your targets will also be relevant to the UK, our nations are separated not only by the Atlantic Ocean but also by a different way of life, a culture gap, and I am not at all sure that I would get anything like as much amusement from your satirical portrait of American society as would a citizen of the USA. You may well think that that view is a very personal one, but what is true for me would probably be true for the majority of my countrymen. Which partly answers your question about the commercial viability of the book – I think you would not find it easy to interest a British publisher – unless, of course, you manage to write so brilliant a book that it becomes a world-wide bestseller. And how can I tell whether you will be capable of that? As for the American market – sorry, I just don't know.
Much more important than all that in my reasons for hesitancy is the fact that I do not find Gordo a sympathetic character. Although you say sometimes that he is confused, it seems to me that the adjective which best describes him is angry. Well, I suppose I ought to understand that, given his situation, but he is so aggressive and self-sufficient that I don't care about him as I think I should. It would work better, at least in my opinion, if you could let us see him rather more as a hurt and frightened individual, covering his confusion with a blustery show of strength which he doesn't really feel. Perhaps this too is a case in which a Brit does not look at things in the same way as they do in the States.
The third reason why I am not enthusing is that it has taken you three chapters to establish the simple idea that Gordo finds himself in the body of Robert J. Hurlbut. What else have you told us? A little about what sort of person he was forty years ago, and that he is in hospital and has had an operation (incidentally, would he be in any condition to go running about all over the place? and in a hospital gown? and naked?), which is not much. According to your synopsis, there is a lot more story to come, so if you are going to continue in the same style it's likely to turn into a monster of a book. That may not be a fair comment to make on the basis of what I have so far read, but I'd certainly like to suggest that you should go through these three chapters (and indeed any subsequent material that you write) taking out as much as you possibly can. The sparer the writing the better, not only because it almost always has much more strength, but because whereas Dickens did not have to hurry himself, knowing that his readers would have both time and a lack of competing distractions, a fast-moving approach is more suited to the frantic pace of the world in which we live. And as a general principle in any kind of fiction you should get to the meat of the story as soon as possible. In case you are thinking that this criticism is in conflict with what I said earlier about the page-turning qualities – well, yes, your prose bustles along, but doesn't get us far enough, taking much too long to set the scene for the rest of the novel.
Well, E. Christopherson, I don't think you will much like what I have said, and I apologise for probably being much too British to be an adequate judge of your work or to give you much useful advice. I don't feel too badly about this because of the gut feeling I get which tells me that you have considerable self-confidence and a belief in what you are doing. That's great! Write the book the way you want to and prove me wrong. And I wish you luck with it.

Michael Legat