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Opinion
Okay, if you have been following me on Twitter, you probably have seen my recent tweets about having to research for context. This is the book I was talking about.
“Mrs. Y. you mentioned research a bunch, what do you mean by research? What exactly did you look up and how?”
Very good question, so let me get this part out of the way. There are whole sections of the book with abbreviations, or words I’m not familiar with, or concepts I don’t understand. When I say I researched, I mean I went to Google first to figure out what it was I was looking at. Then from there, sometimes I had to go to Wikipedia, other times I went to YouTube for explanations, and there was more than once I was on newspapers from the UK to read about things in specific articles.
It’s far too much for me to list here, and it’s just stuff that I needed for my brain to understand what I was reading. It’s not the quality of what I had to do to understand the context, it’s that I had to look any of it up at all to understand the context that I am slightly frustrated by. Well, maybe not slightly. I’ve never had to search so much in a book outside of a school project without really enjoying the topic. This isn’t one of those enjoyable topics.
For those of you who are not familiar with Brexit, this book is going to be strange to you. “Reverend Dumb” basically is a political satire about Brexit, which is the situation where the UK voted to leave the EU. It makes light of many situations, it also speaks to cultural changes and about foreign interference in political situations.
If you are American, Canadian or have no idea what the UK or EU is, this probably is going to be a tough book for you to read. Why? The pacing is acceptable, the structure is simple, but it has to do with the context of the satire.
Think about other satires you've read. One that comes to mind that I think I can draw fair comparisons to is "Alice in Wonderland" which, despite the charming pieces about Wonderland, is mostly a political satire. At the time that was written. For example, the Mad Hatter is a satire on the tax that was being used for certain industries. The "Jolly Caucus Race" is specifically about how the House of Commons did their elections.
Why do I know this? I looked it up a long time ago, and I realize I'm watering down two small examples but I did this to show that I researched it. Even the Red Queen is a political satire.
Now let's talk about "Reverend Dumb" which is also a political satire that is from the UK. To get a joke, you have to know where the jokes are. The other thing about jokes and humor is that it's subjective to the person who is reading or hearing the joke. Not all of us like the same comedians, not all of us like the same flavors of humor either.
"Reverend Dumb" is a political satire that is very niche and has a particular demographic in mind for an appreciative audience. I am not a part of that demographic. Partially because of my geopolitical opinion, and partly because the jokes that are in it are not jokes that I tend to gravitate toward as humorous.
"What kind of jokes?" you probably are asking. I could tell you, but I feel if I do and you are someone who takes things very seriously, you are going to probably get angry. Let me simply go on record that a lot of the jokes that were added, I disliked a bunch once I understood that was a joke.
So let me just do this and review the book as a book, and not go into the geopolitical joking that makes up a good portion of the book.
When we talk about how it is written, the structure, the way the font looks, and of course does this story have a beginning a middle and end, this is my breakdown.
There is a weak beginning that requires research if you are not geopolitically into it. There is a very light middle to it, again requiring a great deal of research to understand it, and the ending is the same. But is it a complete story? I can't really figure it out. There isn't anyone protagonist exactly. There is an antagonist sort of, but that changes too and flops between one character and then a situation. For the most part, the book is about the situation involving Brexit, and the way that the author feels it must be made fun of to one specific audience.
As far as grammar, spelling, and all the importance of a book, which I normally do not personally care about, it’s got some problems. The most distracting issue I had was dialogue problems. If an author puts in dialogue, it's accepted that as long as there are quotation marks around it, we know it is dialogue as a reader. I have read hundreds of thousands of examples of dialogue in books and short stories. I am okay with pretty much any way any author writes their character speaking as long as it fits the story. But I get upset when there is no quotation mark to indicate the portion I read was dialogue. In this book that happens repeatedly, and I stumbled on several examples that start with a quotation mark, but there isn't an ending quotation mark. That forced me to stop, go back, and re-read entire sections to see if the confusing bits where people seemed to understand the characters inner dialogue were actually just dialoguing bits that were missing quotations. Low and behold that's what they were, or else these characters are mind readers.
Then we come to glaring spelling errors. I don't usually give a fig about this stuff, I have trouble with spelling. I also realize in the UK words we spell in America look very different. That's not what I'm referring to here. When you see things like "t that" and words that look to be stuttered but are not in dialogue and not a specific dialogue technique. The double letters or issues with spelling, look like editing issues. I also found examples of missing letters, and all of these problems happen often enough that it's noticeable by someone who really doesn't usually care about it. There are other smaller issues, but it’s nitpicking at this point and I don’t wish to nitpick this book.
Review and Score
With the amount of research I did, with how difficult it was to read given the research issues and context, how some of the jokes when I did understand them, I found offensive, and the problems with the structure of the book I had, I'm giving this book probably the lowest score I've ever given a book. This is most totally not my cup of tea if you will, and the fact that I had to read or re-read dialogue due to the quotation mark issue cemented my opinion.
Let me make one thing very clear though, I am not the target audience for this book. I don't live in the UK, I also do not share the same cultural feelings on things that the reader who would enjoy this book does. So, I want to be very clear here, my opinion is subjective to me, and me alone.
I am giving this book at 24/100. If you do live in the UK and you love satire that is close to home, please read this book. You might actually enjoy it, you may be the targeted audience the author is going for. I just know that I am not.
