Customer Reviews

Soft!

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Alternating points of view, the author brings his main characters together in the most surprising fashion. What awaits the reader is the ultimate satisfaction - a literary mystery/thriller with a real sense of mystery and more than a few thrills. Funny. Always interesting. Get it while it's orange.

I'm being a bit cheeky in writing this as I am a few pages from the end, however I have to say that this book is one of my favourites all ready, this book is dripping with real-life, no contrived situations the plot flows more smoothly than a greased pint of guiness running over a silk shirt.

The motivation, the idea behind this book is quite frighteneing, maybe its already being implemented, maybe someones already doing it.

basically .. go out and buy this book now!.

"Soft" by Rupert Thomson is a remarkable book. Before you start reading it, breathe deeply. Thomsons always dense, gloomy descriptions can give you a bad feeling, if unprepared. Impressing how easily he changes roles between the 3 different main characters and how his prose understands to mirror the lingering decay and confusion of Glade Spencer, his tragic female hero. It's strirring. Don't start to read this book, when you have to get up early next morning...

I found this book to be completely engaging. It's quite unusual to find a novel that so deftly handles effective characterization and a surprising plot with such literary panache. While it's not a long book, it's so packed with detail that it contains much more than many books twice the length. Everything wonderfully connects, even though the first hints that convergence is in the offing don't begin until about two fifths through the book. By the end I was highly impressed by Thomson's architecture and how deliciously everything connects. This novel would be a fascinating vehicle for a group discussion, not least because of the larger issues that it raises about greed, manipulation, and outright evil.

Soft is quite simply one of the best English novels of 1998. It is subtle. It is clever. And it could only have been written at the end of the century.

But it is not a conventional thriller. It is not a Tom Clancy style `Character A is motivated by factors XYZ and will therefore by the end of the book have murdered Characters BC and D'.

It's much, much better than that. It's one of those rare books which reflect the complexities of life. It accepts that people's fates are interlinked but delves darkly into how the small choices we make can have ultimately disastrous consequences.

The opening section in particular is one of the finest psychological profiles you will ever read about how the less fortunate in our society are inevitably trapped by circumstances beyond their control. It debunks any idiotic myths that the `proles' know no better and deserve what they get.

This is a fantastic study of human beings wanting to do well, yet failing. I'd certainly put Thomson up there as England's answer to Pynchon and De Lillo.

the plot is set up in such a way that the reader is constantly 2 steps ahead of the author, and i was irritated and anxious for him to catch up to me - he never did. and then there are the characters - poorly drawn (unless you take repetiive and meandering descriptions of idiosyncracies as character), totally unsympathetic, dull and really just stupid whereas i believe - and admittedly im not really sure what the author intended with this excessively mediocre, plodding and boring piece of fiction - the author simply meant them to be flawed. the conclusion - i can't rightfully call it a "climax" - is especially indicative of the rest of the novel - meandering, pointless, and expected. there is nothing real or interesting to grasp onto here and i resent the author for every minute i spent reading this book. there is nothing original or intersting here.

In Plymouth, England a drunk Steve Scully throws a wild haymaker at Barker but misses and falls down a set of stairs to his death. After nine hours of intense police questioning and the influential Scully clan believing he killed their beloved Steve, Barker decides it is time to go to London.

Glade Spencer has gone to a sleep clinic to help her with her insomnia. However, unbeknownst to the pretty art student, she and other patients are to serve as unwitting salespersons for a new soft drink, called SOFT, which appears to be the next major international seller if it can crack the already glutted market. However, when Glade starts to act a bit eccentric and loony, the soft drink company realizes they must eliminate the evidence. They hire Barker to kill Glade before the media learns the side effects of SOFT, but he came to London to get away from his violent lifestyle, not get deeper involved in it.

Rupert Thomson, in his fifth novel, continues to scribe wonderfully, wacky, and witty tales of misdeeds. His latest book, SOFT, is a hard edged satire that simply turns upside down the corruption typically seen by large corporations. Thus, this pleasurable story line leaves readers with a droll irony of modern day life. This reviewer strongly recommends all of Mr. Thomson's novels because they are some of the best social satires of the decade.

Harriet Klausner