Customer Reviews

The Portable Door

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I automatically give any book extra points for laugh-out-loud moments, and although there aren't that many in this book, they ARE present, esp with Mr. Tanner's mum around.

Paul Carpenter is having a bad day. Well, it's his first day of work at J.W Wells & co as a junior clerk, along with Sophie, a woman with all the [looks], as the books' cover tells you. Nevertheless,when Paul and Sophie forget the company's rule of leaving the building by 5:30p.m., they discover that things are not all they expected. The building's owned by goblins, for one thing.

And when one of the senior partners sets them to cleaning out and categorizing all the odd items in the basement (they find Scarlett o'Hara's birth certificate and the map to King Solomon's mines, among other things) Paul finds things getting weirder and weirder. For one thing, he meets the mother of one of the senior partners. Mr Tanner's mum is a highly engaging character.

Tom Holt is oft compared to Terry Pratchett, but since his novel is actually set in England, I found his characters using a lot more English slang than discworld characters would. Although this can be slightly uncomfortable at first, you soon get used to it as the story takes you on a log-ride of a plot, with slow moments, sudden twists and turns, and a final splash of a climax before you climb out of the story.

Paul seemed unutterably wimpy at first, even annoying sometimes, but about halfway through the book, I started feeling sorry for him, and then rooting for him, and he finally did grow a backbone and I was cheering for him all the way.

Read The Portable Door if you're looking for a light-hearted fantasy novel about 'The Corporation' and two clueless junior clerks in England. I enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected I would.

Maybe you think your boss is an ogre - you haven't seen anything.

Paul and Sophie meet at a job interview, commiserating over the steady stream of handsome, well-dressed, competent-looking people interviewing ahead of them. They both know that, if added together, they might total a whole personality (but not a very interesting one). They are both surprised to meet each other again on starting day at the new job. They are surprised again at the mind-numbing boredom of the apparently senseless tasks they are given, but even more suprised at the weirdness that starts to emerge as they sort and file. Was that really a love letter from Sophie to Paul in the archives - dated 100 years ago?

That's where the story really starts, and Holt steers it along an amusing route in his trademark form: the hero never quite knowing what's going on, in and out the mysterious doorways, and increasing strangeness right to the end. This time Holt adds a comical attempt at romance between two people who seem to like the idea, but don't quite know how to go about it. (That anarcho-socialist ceramics performance artist doesn't help anything.)

This is a good one, but I think Holt put a lot more book around the story than it really needed. Yes, we see from the start that Paul and Sophie are both the Novacaine of social sensation. Yes, we are tantalized by the gathering clues that all is not what it seemed. I think all that could have been established in a bit les than 175 pages, though, and the next 200+ pages were only a bit more tightly-packed.

If you're the kind who gets testy when Pratchett's next book is later than you want, Holt might help you get by. He has a lot of the same slanted view of the world, and a lot of the same funny/fantasy story line. Holt has written some very good stories, and this is a good one. I have to admit, though, that readers new to Holt might get a better first impression by reading another title first.

//wiredweird

This is the first of three books in the Paul Carpenter series by Tom Holt. The other two are 'In Your Dreams' and 'Earth, Air, Fire, and Custard.' I accidentally read the third book first and so thought that I wouldn't enjoy the first book very much, but I was wrong. I consider Tom Holt's writings to be the real world comparison of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Basically, it may be helpful to read them in a certain order, but in the end, it doesn't matter because they are all just as good on their own since both authors are a comic genius. While Pratchett deals with a made-up world on the back of a turtle, Holt deals with 'our' world. The Carpenter series is based around office life, with a bit of magic mixed in. Extremely funny, even if you have never worked in an office. I also love the art on the front of Holt's books, so simplistic, but precisely dead-on as to what the story is about. For those who have never read Holt before, pick up one of his books and give it a try!

This is a brilliant beginning of a series that plays with the conventions of fantasy and offers a great deal of insight into the machinations of office life. It's as though Arthur Dent was dropped into the world of Harry Potter and got a job in The Office (the Ricky Gervais version). The story focuses on the misadventures of Paul Carpenter, a twentysomething man who has been coasting through life, who needs a job and finds one at J.W. Wells, a clandestine company with a building that resembles an M.C. Escher drawing. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, as most of the joy in this novel is stumbling along with Paul and discovering just how weird his world has become. It's a great read with plenty of hilarious moments, but a real depth to it that draws the reader in. And thankfully it's only part one of the series.

There are so many memorable bits in this book your brain would be quite addled if you tried to store them all.

Paul is your prototype hopeless dork (reminds me of my brother with the ability to fall in love randomly and always helplessly) who gets a job (against all expectation) with a mysterious company.

His co-worker is the same odd girl who interviewed with him, and she has some revolting personal hygene habits.
They're made for each other, only neither of them is quite sure of this, and it may never happen.

All sorts of disastrously weird things occur which put the sparkle in your Holt, and I'm not going to say too much more about the plot.
There was one scene where there were so many literary references thrown in it was like pin the tail on the donkey trying to place them all.

Very cool, and Paul is about as useful as day old porridge, ditto Sophie, his co-worker.

Will the dorks rule the world? You'll have to read it and see.

Kotori Nov 2004

The Portable Door opens with the two unlikeliest of clerk candidates landing a position at the JW Wells company of 22 St Mary Axe. Our lead character, Paul Carpenter, is drifting through life with no particular family ties and his female interest, Sophie, is a hard-nosed, idealistic character whose outward treatment of people masks a reluctance to engage emotively. She's actually quite irritating and thankfully Holt packs her off to Hollywood in the sequel.
The novel concerns the first few months of the pair as they work for a company utterly unlike your usual one. This company is a conglomerate of magicians and enchanters, fey-folk and goblins who cheerfully look after the supernatural side of earth's life whilst making a tidy fortune on the side.
After spending weeks doing filing the truth is gradually revealed as they work for Mr Tanner scrying bauxite mines, then down in the cellars cataloguing miscellaneous items (usually from famous people), then Humphrey Wells, Van Spee, Suslowicz, Rick Wormtoter and Judy Castel'Bianco. Paul finds a portable door that allows him to travel through both time and space which he uses out of boredom, all the while trying to decide if he fancies Sophie or not.
Inevitably the door gets him in some trouble and he finds himself in a Schroedinger's room where two of the company personnel have been locked for ages.
After dealing with the ever persistent and seductive Mrs Tanner (goblin by night, voluptuous receptionist by day) he and Sophie end up foiling a century long office politics plot with the use of a somewhat more-than-meets-the-eye stapler and an irreversible love potion.
Having read Holt's historical novels (highly recommended to any fan of the genre) I decided to have a go through his more prolific fantasy pen and I have not come away disappointed. The only flaw in this opener was the character of Sophie but as she's gone in the next I'm cheerfully reading that at some pace.
It's brilliantly inventive, narrated at a careless speed that make the plot plausible and cheerfully answers the question as to what actually goes on in the office once every human has left. Read it.

The storytelling keeps you hooked, but the premise is so far-fetched that it detracts from the plot. Holt is a master at storytelling, setting up wacky situations and realistic tension between his characters. His dialogue is sparse, but accurate in conveying the crux of the plot, like when Paul forgets his date with Sophie and she detects something is wrong when there is a minute lapse in the conversation. She blew him off for the ceramics guy and you don't know how she feels. I liked Expecting_Someone_Taller maybe a little better, since the the supernatural was more of a frame for the story rather than the sci-fi trappings here. I liked the love-philtre scenes and think he achieved a very original and satisfying solution to the moral paradox of the love-potion/date-rape conundrum. The ending seemed to go off in a new, unresolved direction instead of explaining the rest of my questions, but you need to do that if you are planning to write sequels, don't you?

What fun! Holt plays brilliantly off literary references both new and old (everything from Harry Potter to Shakespeare to Gilbert & Sulivan) and his dry British wit is right up my alley. An absolutely delightful read. Funny, adventuresome, and clever to boot!

This is a book so hilarious that I have repeated bits of the jokes in two settings in the two days since I finished it (the bit about Chekov. And this one little joke made people laugh so hard that tears came to their eyes. And I can't tell jokes. And it was out of context.

That's how funny this is. Douglas Adams meets the Office.

Holt is sort of a genre of his own. His stories are always: entertaining, original,
and somewhat weird. In this one Paul (hapless dweb) takes a job at J.W. Wells & Co then things get really strange. Most of the book goes by before the plot really shakes out but it is still a fun read with good characters and a lot of screwy humor.

Obviously somewhat inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Sorcerer".