Customer Reviews

Aberystwyth Mon Amour

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4 star:		(2)
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Malcolm Pryce has mastered understated humour with this book. There is a slightly dark edge to the whole book. The visual style of the book comes off the page very clearly as it captures the slightly seedy underside of a family seaside resort in Wales.
We follow the bizarre lives of a Dick Tracey-esque Private investigator, Aber's answer to Quasimodo and the Druid organisation represented as a cross between the Freemasons and the Cosa Nostra.
The killer joke would be spoiled if I told you, but the truth about Mr Lovespoon is truly shocking!!

The more you know about Welsh culture and folklore, the funnier this book is. The sultry chanteuse sings peppy Welsh folksongs, the hooker with a heart of gold wears a basque and the stovepipe hat of female folk costume, and the evil Welsh teacher wants to repopulate Cantref-y-Gwaelod, the sunken land said to lie under Cardigan Bay just north of town. Pryce knows the geography of Aberystwyth and the surrounding area like the back of his hand--having lived in Aber in the early '90s, I could see exactly where events were taking place--yet it's all slightly twisted, like the addition of a Welsh war in Patagonia sometime in the 1950's. The very idea of a Chandleresque noir mystery set in Aber, of all places, is so absurdly wonderful... I hope there will be a follow-up, and soon!

While in one of my frequent trips to England, I chanced upon this series of books set in Aberystwyth, my family's ancestral home; hence a read was irresistable.

There are four of them published to date (more please), and you should read them in order as the characters recur in each book and are introduced sequentially. Although the characterization is best in the later books as Pryce gets going.

Simply put, they are zany. Pryce not only weaves fantasy into Wales (but remember that Arthurian tales emanate from nearby), but throws in Wittgensteinian metaphysics. As an aside, Druids control the Aberystwyth mafia. I certainly have no idea if his geography is accurate (see other reviews on this page), and I know that I did not recognize all the allusions, but he a much more profound writer than would be suggested. He provokes some pretty good questions about how we perceive one another and the extent to which fraternal love and ordinary (perhaps extraordinary love) happen day-to-day.

As other reviewers have noted, you have to read awhile before you catch on. A Hasidic-murdered Santa Claus working for the Mossad mixed with a Welsh invasion of Argentina are hard to follow, but the stories do weave together if you are patient. While you are waiting for the mystery to unravel, you are well entertained by the Dr. Who-like silliness described in Aberystwyth.

Even the movie title book titles are a little abstract. Are they gimics or do they allude to the content? Even after reading all four I am still not sure.

In a literary world drab with overwraught themes, these books stand far apart for entertainment value, provocative thought, and tortuous plot evolution.

Wales has the lowest homicide rate of any country in the world. Its most militant revolutionary movement involved transvestites refusing to pay highway tolls; no witch was ever executed in Wales; the ancient Welsh laws enacted stern penalties for killing a cat.
All this presents problems for the Welsh crime writer, who is forced into realms of fantasy and satire. Aberystwyth is a name evoking such innocence that merely setting a vicious organized crime network there is a joke. The merriment of this may be lost upon the non-Welsh, of which the world contains unfortunately large numbers.
There are some wonderful moments (such the forensic tea-cosy expert able to tell the source of any tea-cosy from a single thread and find links to meso-American religious imagery) but the plot gets in the way of the jokes and the jokes get in the way of plot. The author adds an alternative history fantasy element and incoherence sets in.
It is all too much. Pryce suffers from an over-abundance of talent. He must learn to restrain himself.

Hysterically funny spoof on hard-boiled detective story. You may need to work a little on the Welch slang, but well worth it.

A little of the fantastical and a lot of the mystery. A little of the violence and a lot of the humor. A little of the weird and a lot of the noir. And a lot more fun in store since this is the first of a series.

In the real town of Aberystwyth, there are some serious events taking place. People are being killed. How surprising is that for a mystery? I know. Not very. But this mystery has druids. And, it has bar girls. And it has druids in the bars with the bar girls. And it has a mysterious ark, or it doesn't but some think it does.

This is just plain fun. The characters are enough off kilter to be worth getting to know. There's something shady about all of them, including our hero, Louie. Last name? Knight. Not too subtle. Or maybe it is quite subtle. The setting is totally foreign in many ways for an American reader, and possibly for someone from Wales.

Pryce knows how to write and tell a story. If you like a little sleaze with your mystery alongside some humor and quirky folks, then give this a try. I have the rest of the series on my bookshelves - all four of them ordered after I had read a couple of chapters of this. How's that for a recommendation? Last Tango in Aberystwyth is next.

The first Aberystwyth book I encountered was the fourth one in the series. I decided not to read that one and bought the first book instead. I'm glad I did.

Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth is so utterly bizarre and so unlike anything I have ever encountered, I'm glad I gave myself the chance to savour each episode in order. The plot is convoluted and as far-fetched as the alter-Aberystwyth world of Pryce's imagination, but that hardly matters. The fun in the book is the noir, Chandler-esque prose set against the backdrop of a Welsh seaside tourist town. Pryce has the genre nailed perfectly--the dark, terse lines, the pervading sense of danger and decay and the hard-boiled detective with a haunted past. Classic stuff.

The only caveat is it helps to be Welsh, or know a lot about the Welsh culture. While it might be possible to enjoy the book without such background knowledge, the more you know, the more `in' jokes you will get.

In Aberystwyth Mon Amour, Malcolm Pryce employs the cliches of Welsh culture to create a hard-boiled detective comedy. In Pryce's alternate version of Welsh vacation spot Aberystwyth, the tea-cozy shops are houses of ill repute, you forget your worries by downing a shot of ice cream, and if you're depressed, you go to the 24 hour whelk stand to brood over your mussels.

Throughout the disorganized, Chandleresque story, Pryce throws in bizarre Welsh detail after bizarre Welsh detail, even inventing a Welsh version of Viet Nam -- its fictional war with Patagonia. I'm not from the UK, and I'm sure I did not get many more than half of the references Pryce puts in, but even so it is a rich stew of strangeness.

The thing I did not expect was how engrossed I would be by the detective story. I thought the plot was going to be just a clothesline on which Prcye would hang his gags. But, by keeping his delivery completely straight-faced even when he is going over the top and by giving us enough human, emotional observation to make me care about the characters, he managed to get me involved in the story almost as much as in the gags. Towards the end, I was turning the pages eagerly, as much to see what would happen next as to enjoy Pryce's weird Wales.