Books
It was a long time ago that Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously warned against choosing someone dull for the central character of your poem, as "It is not possible to imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of dullness and garrulity." It was a bit discouraging, then, that by the time I got to page four of The Portable Door by Tom Holt, the narrator was already apologising for the tedious personality and 'failed jokes' of the hero, Paul. The joke in question looks fairly innocuous. Paul is asked why he has applied for a job:
"Oh, I don't know," he replied, wondering why in hell he'd raised the subject in the first place. "Because it was there, I suppose... I apply for most things that don't involve getting shot at or A-level Sanskrit."
The trouble is that it's not really possible to separate Paul's lamely unfunny wit from that of the narrator. Both are a bit like ready meals; they look like the real thing, they smell like the real thing, but in the end you feel a bit unsatisfied, and wish you'd gone to McDonald's instead.
Yet even the trashiest of cuisine has its own, bloated admirers. On the first page of Holt's supremely enthusiastic fanzine/website, one of his best jokes takes centre stage:
How many spectral warriors does it take to change a lightbulb?
One, and a stepladder. At a pinch, of course, he could just stand on a chair.
The novel takes off from a satire of office life which might aspire to the weakly amusing, if it hadn't been done so many times before, and so much better. The evocations of drudgery and boredom are a bit like The Office, only without the tight, accurate focus that makes the TV series so funny. The parables of insecurity and inadequacy bear a passing resemblance to Bridget Jones' Diary, as when Paul eyes up his competitors at the interview:
They were all, as far as he could tell, perfect: superbeings, almost certainly with superhuman powers and quite possibly from the planet Krypton.
For the poor lay reader, an understanding of Superman is too much to ask for the privilege of understanding this gag.
From this equally innocuous beginning, the novel spirals increasingly, distressingly deeply into a rather loosely plotted series of excursions involving oversexed goblins, sadistic magicians, and a revolutionary performance ceramics artist, although the main action is a good old-fashioned heterosexual romance plot. To give away more would be to ruin Holt's careful planning, but it's worth bearing in mind that to get at said plot, you do have to wade through the quagmires of Holt's similes, that clog his prose like hair in the drain. He can carry on endlessly, and not entirely convincingly, on oddness: 'as crazy as a barrelful of ferrets'; 'weird as square eggs'; 'crazy as a tankful of gay piranhas.'
Holt clearly has a devoted following: he has published twenty- six novels, and the sequel to The Portable Door is already out. Chances are, if you like this kind of thing, you'll already own it. But Orbit's excessive claim for Tom Holt ('Britain's funniest writer'), might adequately be qualified by their description of the genre he writes in: 'Humorous Fantasy'.
12th Feb 2004