Wry ... Greathead is a competent storyteller with an eye for a psychologically telling detail; The Book of George is crisp at the sentence level, and its bittersweet denouement is touchingly rendered. But the characterisation is simplistic to the point of triteness. George registers primarily as a set of recognisably annoying traits: a patchwork creature, engineered for maximum relatability. He’s too hammed up to feel real, and his misadventures aren’t hilarious enough for him to pass muster as a comic antihero. The novel’s plot structure, not so much an arc as a linear litany of mishaps, is somewhat unsatisfying. Dull, coasting failure is a risky subject for narrative fiction: it is by its nature dreary and samey. Plodding along without purpose or direction, The Book of George resembles its protagonist a bit too closely.
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