Post by pennyt on Jul 8, 2016 7:21:24 GMT
Blurb from Amazon: Andrew Landford is driving home one night, along a dark country lane, when a barn owl flies into his windscreen. It is an accident, nothing more. However Andrew is in line to be the country's next prime minister. And he has recently been appointed to a parliamentary committee concerned with the Wildlife and Countryside Act. Barn Owls are protected species, and it is a crime to kill one. If Andrew acknowledges that he has killed the owl, he could be risking his political career.
With Andrew in the car is his old Oxford friend and political adviser, Charles Fryerne. An expert in communications, Charles has just joined the team that is masterminding Andrew's route to the Tory Party leadership, and from there to No 10 Downing Street. He has spent many years quietly building up a very successful career as a strategist.
But the death of the owl threatens to destroy not only Andrew's career, but everything that Charles has worked for too. Should they come clean, or hide the story and hope it goes away?
This is the book Paul Torday was writing during the last months of his life; it was finished after his death by his son, Piers, and I must say I did feel I could "see the join", as it were, not that that detracts from the book in any way at all. As the blurb says, this is a novel set in the world of politics and hence in a world where truth is malleable rather than fixed, where spin is all and where the right or wrong emphasis can make or break careers. As such it's at times bitingly satirical and I have to say it raises far more grins of wry acknowledgement than of amusement in its depiction of the ways in which facts are distorted for political ends. It's all too easy to think of real-life examples of politicians caught in similarly tangled webs of deception of their own making (the most obvious parallel being probably the Chris Huhne speeding case). I found the characters here perhaps more true to life, but less quirky and far less sympathetic than in any of Torday's other books. Indeed, overall the tone is much darker and more sinister than in his earlier books, with a hint of almost supernatural malevolence in the later chapters. (It was here I felt I could detect the influence of Piers Torday more than of his father.)
This isn't my favourite of Torday's novels by a long chalk and I did miss the whimsicality that set his earlier books apart, but it's still a good read and poses some interesting questions about the nature of truth and honesty, and the conundrum that being truthful can damage one person or cause as much as it benefits another.
With Andrew in the car is his old Oxford friend and political adviser, Charles Fryerne. An expert in communications, Charles has just joined the team that is masterminding Andrew's route to the Tory Party leadership, and from there to No 10 Downing Street. He has spent many years quietly building up a very successful career as a strategist.
But the death of the owl threatens to destroy not only Andrew's career, but everything that Charles has worked for too. Should they come clean, or hide the story and hope it goes away?
This is the book Paul Torday was writing during the last months of his life; it was finished after his death by his son, Piers, and I must say I did feel I could "see the join", as it were, not that that detracts from the book in any way at all. As the blurb says, this is a novel set in the world of politics and hence in a world where truth is malleable rather than fixed, where spin is all and where the right or wrong emphasis can make or break careers. As such it's at times bitingly satirical and I have to say it raises far more grins of wry acknowledgement than of amusement in its depiction of the ways in which facts are distorted for political ends. It's all too easy to think of real-life examples of politicians caught in similarly tangled webs of deception of their own making (the most obvious parallel being probably the Chris Huhne speeding case). I found the characters here perhaps more true to life, but less quirky and far less sympathetic than in any of Torday's other books. Indeed, overall the tone is much darker and more sinister than in his earlier books, with a hint of almost supernatural malevolence in the later chapters. (It was here I felt I could detect the influence of Piers Torday more than of his father.)
This isn't my favourite of Torday's novels by a long chalk and I did miss the whimsicality that set his earlier books apart, but it's still a good read and poses some interesting questions about the nature of truth and honesty, and the conundrum that being truthful can damage one person or cause as much as it benefits another.