Customer Reviews

Arigato

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Here's a blurb from the back cover:

"Condon at his most fantastic! He has never been better!"

-The New Yorker

Really? He has never been better? The New Yorker critic thinks that Arigato is just as good as or better than The Manchurian Candidate. The fact of the matter is that The Manchurian Candidate is at least two orders of magnitude better than this book.

Which is not to say that Arigato has nothing to recommend it. In fact, it starts off quite well. The first half of the book concerns itself with fleshing out the main character Capt. Colin Huntington, Royal Navy (ret), the quintessential English gentleman. Capt. Huntington has impeccable taste when it comes to wine and food. His manners and mode of dress are beyond reproach. He has a Rolls Royce, a French mistress and a wealthy American wife whose political connections would put any Kennedy to shame. Capt. Huntington has only one fault. He is a compulsive gambler who, because of some deep seated aberrant psychological need, enjoys losing more than winning.

Condon presents all this with delightfully outrageous, over-the-top humor. So far so good. But, in the second half of the book, something goes awry.

In order to make good on his extensive gambling debts and to prevent his wife from divorcing him, Capt. Huntington devises and orchestrates a multifaceted, international robbery, guarganutan in scope and dizzingly complex in detail. Here again, Condon uses way over-the-top humor as he goes about making Arigato the no holds barred black comedy it was designed to be.

But there's a problem. At various stages of the crime, large numbers of completely innocent bystanders, including at least one child, are unceremoniously killed off, turning Arigato from a black comedy into more of a sick comedy.

Now I'm sure Condon thought that by writing a ridiculously high body count into the plot, he would be further emphasizing the book's absurdity, thereby immunizing himself against accusations of bad taste. I don't think he succeeded.