Booker Book 1 : Netherland

Finally finished Netherland by Joseph O’Neill last night.

That may sound like I had to labour through it for the last few days and didn’t enjoy it all that much. I hope it sounds like that. That was the exact tone I was going for.

First off, linky to complete review, which seems to be some sort of ‘rotten tomatoes for books’. Which reminds me: why isn’t there a rotten tomatoes for books?

Back to the book. I don’t want to sound too harsh so I’ll mention firstly that I’ve never ‘gotten’ cricket. In fact I’ve never really been interested enough to try to understand it, and when a variety of cricket types have tried to explain the rules, the purpose, the passion etc I have usually ended up politely asking them to save their breath. This book is almost entirely about cricket. So I started off at a distinct disadvantage.

The book is also set in New York, and I haven’t been there since I was a kid so haven’t developed a post-adolescent appreciation of the magic of the city that never sleeps even if you want it to. Many of the more positive reviews of the book are by NY-based publications and writers, which is probably significant.

It’s well-written, to a point, but while the story didn’t really get me interested that would be forgivable if I had enjoyed the characters, or on any level started to care about them. The fact is that by the time I was three quarters of the way through the book I was hoping the narrative would abruptly end with the untimely death of ‘our hero’ Hans. That’s how much I liked him.

The premise of his isolation leading him into the world of New York cricket is fine, but the fact that Hans spends the duration of the novel being unhappy, alone, and playing cricket with people he barely speaks to did very little for me.

Last year I absolutely hated Anne Enright’s The Gathering, and she won the prize… so maybe this is a good sign for Joseph O’Neill. Personally I’m moving on to Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture hoping for something a little, nay a lot, more interesting…