Soft! [Hardcover]

Rupert Thomson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 25, 1998

The waitress Glade Spencer--white-blond hair, perfect skin, just twenty-two years old--drifts innocent and waiflike through life, thus far avoiding harm to herself . . . Barker Dodds, hoping to shed his hard-man reputation, has fled his native Plymouth for a fresh start in London.
There, meanwhile, in an act of desperate inspiration, an ambitious young executive faced with a saturated market contrives a revolutionary strategy for introducing a new beverage, Soft!, that has all the potential of becoming the soft drink of the twenty-first century.
Once this highly confidential strategy develops unforeseen complications, Barker is paid a visit by
a friend from the old life, and soon is presented
with an unthinkable dilemma. And the person with whom he now shares a destiny--unbeknownst to her--is Glade.  
Rupert Thomson, author of The Insult ("A psychological thriller that has just about everything"
--Cleveland Plain Dealer), here explores the price of ambition, the difficulty of change or escape, and
the needs that drive us or that we ourselves create; and in Soft! he again transforms the conventions
of noir--whether contract-killing or romance or the classic double-cross--into fiction that is remarkably contemporary and strange.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

At first glance, the thrillers of British author Rupert Thomson seem to have nothing in common except the expansiveness of his imagination and the lucid radiance of his writing. Air & Fire is about a group of French people sent to California at the end of the 19th century to build a church. The Insult is about a man blinded by a robber in a supermarket parking lot who discovers one night that--because of a bizarre experiment--he can see again. Thomson's latest finds three very different characters--an aimless waitress, a reluctant hit man, and an ambitious young marketing executive--linked by the sudden success of a new soft drink. But a closer look confirms the feeling that Soft! continues the author's fascination with the way science can bend and shape the destinies of all sorts of nonscientific people. Certainly Glade Spencer, the flaky young woman who flies off periodically for unpleasant encounters with her American lawyer boyfriend, has no idea when she signs up for a sleep clinic to earn some extra cash that the soda slogans planted in her brain could cause her death. Barker Dodds, the nightclub bouncer from Plymouth, doesn't know why he's being paid to kill Glade. And James Lyle, the striving marketer who thought up the brainwashing scheme in the first place, is deliberately out of the loop about its consequences. All three are so perfectly drawn that you'd recognize them on the street, and the way Thomson describes their quirky, weirdly decorated flats and lifestyles captures the flickering pulse of London with uncanny accuracy. --Dick Adler

From Publishers Weekly

Thomson (Air and Fire; The Five Gates of Hell) is a hugely talented but hard-to-classify British writer whose books so far have had little in common beyond their soaring imagination and startling vividness of style. Soft!, which is at once a literary thriller of dazzling velocity and a portrait of contemporary London that invites comparison with the best work of Martin Amis, should win him a much wider readership. There are three principal characters. Barker Dodds, a big, rough man who has worked as a bouncer, leaves provincial Plymouth because the family of a local man thinks Barker killed him; he goes to London to try for a new life, only to find he can't escape a violent past. Glade Spencer is an attractive young waitress with an unpredictable American boyfriend who occasionally sends her airline tickets to visit him, but who otherwise seems to be waiting for something to happen. Jimmy is an upwardly mobile young executive at an American-owned soft-drinks company that is about to introduce a new product to the British market; he has a bright?but ultimately dangerous?idea to promote it, designed to impress a fearsome American boss. As these three lives improbably interact, Thomson tells a tale that is at once a scary study of consumer culture, a riveting crime story and a novel in which London itself?its weather, its passers-by, its rooms and its Tube stops?becomes a contributing character portrayed with a dark poetry. Thomson has created dozens of unforgettable cameos to bring his people to life: Barker's earlier girlfriends; Glade's dazzlingly surreal trips to Miami and New Orleans, her sad visits to her bewildered, abandoned father in a caravan in a remote Lancashire field; Jimmy's anxious flirtations. It is rare to find a book of such headlong readability that is also studded with memorable images of people and places.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 307 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (August 25, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375402241
• ISBN-13: 978-0375402241
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,352,214 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Weaving, September 9, 1999

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Soft! (Hardcover)

Thomson's excellent fifth divided into six parts. In the first we meet a tough, lonely bouncer who moves down to London to avoid a spot of bother. In part two we meet a young waitress who has an unsatisfactory long-distance relationship with an American. In the third we meet a young go-getter executive in the London office of a multinational soft-drink giant. Each of these characters are interesting and in the fourth and fifth parts we see them begin to interact, and begin to appreciate how they relate. The sixth part is an epilogue. The plot revolves around the launch of a new soft drink, and the lengths taken to promote it. In the end, things don't work out quite the way you expect, but it is a tale well told.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Waste of a good idea, May 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Soft! (Hardcover)

Didn't like this at all. What a waste of a good idea (mind you, that could be said about many books). The characters failed to interest me in the slightest. It seemed that every man jack of them was a walking cliche with a couple of (heavily belaboured) idiosyncrasies stuck on top in a vain attempt to hide the dullness. The heavy with a heart? The young woman living in a dreamworld? The grasping marketing exec? The charismatic American fixer? The shady 'safe pair of hands'? How many times have we seen these people before? Stick to the ideas Rupert Thomson, and get someone else to turn them into a story for you.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The title says it all, October 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Soft! (Hardcover)

In the Australian-released paperback edition of Rupert Thomson's fifth tome, "Soft", the cover is a shocking orange flourescent colour. On closer inspection, there appears a hologram-like logo sprouting subliminal instructions. The plot thickens? Actually it doesn't. It is as thin and shallow as the ethical fortitude of one of the author's more corrupt characters - Jimmy Lyle.

Jimmy knows there's nothing soft about the soft-drinks industry. Accordingly, his company's battle for UK market share - of their innovative orange-flavoured newcomer, Kwench! - entails a novel marketing strategy; word of mouth. So he dismisses the ad agency and with the money saved, recruits a number of 'ambassadors' whose thirst and praise for the new product knows no bounds. Unquenchable you might say.

But appearances can be deceiving. Under the guise of a sleep disorder treatment, Jimmy implements his personality-programming idea in a conspiratorial coup George Orwell would have found impressive. Things begin successfully but soon descend into the neither world of synchronised swimming and contract killing in a tale supposedly touted as a psychological thriller. You'd be excused for thinking Jimmy is the central figure. He's not. There isn't one. Rather, he is just one of a number of underdeveloped and cliche-addled characters who enter and exit throughout the disjointed narrative.

Englishman Thomson's previous output, "The Insult", was generally well received. Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) described it as being "on the dark side of the brain, full of grief and deliciously strange comedy". With this, his latest Knopf release, Thomson has neglected the hard-edged urban grit or his earlier works, much to this reader's chagrin. Some might say he's gone, soft, for want of a better word.