Customer Reviews

Utterly Monkey: A Novel (P.S.)

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

 

 

Curious to read Nick Laird after noting that he was on the Booker longlist for Glover's Mistake, this title was sitting on the library shelves just waiting to be read. While it does fall into the lad/caper formula, this book is a much finer piece of writing than other examples of the genre. He has so many wonderful, comical observations of everyday life that I found utterly delightful. Light, easy and very funny - don't listen to the grumpy reviewers - it's pure formula but very well executed.

I really enjoyed this book. It is not a work of genius. It will not change your life. Nevertheless, it was interesting, funny, and even a little exciting. In all honesty, if you don't laugh at the story that sparks the fist fight between Geordie and Danny, you would never have liked this book anyway. I look forward to Laird's next novel.

I would take with a grain of salt reviews (such as the booklist review above) that do not understand that the IRA is a Republican organization, and all of the Irish characters in this book are Protestants, and Unionists. That error means they missed one of the interesting things about this book. It is one of the rare instances of a book set, in part, in Northern Ireland told from the Protestant perspective. That is a serious gap in a reviewer's understanding. Ditto all of the "lad lit" descriptions. Lad mags, at least, are for 20 something kids trying to feel sophisticated. The point of Danny's redemption is not meant for those kids. They won't understand it. Only after you've had the opportunity to sell your soul for work a few times will it make sense. Hence, the work cannot possibly be for "lads."

Laird enters a crowded field of Belfast writers, and though he lacks Colin Bateman's ability to contrive wild plots, R. McLiam Wilson's lyrical brilliance, and the bitter real politik of the dramatist Gary Mitchell, Laird provides a readable addition to the literature of "The Armed Peace."

Depicting disaffected, drifting Prods in the cultural landscape in which the Catholic nationalists are perceived to have won, his plot largely depends upon generic, predictable tropes--the jaded young London lawyer who has a change of heart that motivates him to sabotage a predatory corporate takeover, and the same jaded young lawyer locked into a bitter (though seemingly arbitrary) oedipal struggle with the firm's senior partner. But the major contrivance is this same lawyer falling in love with the firm's exotic and beautiful young lawyer--first feeling in awe of her, bedding her only to find that she has recently ended an affair with his bete noire senior partner, irrationally and brutally rejecting her, and eventually recognizing his error and reconciling with her. (One wonders and never knows what she sees in this lackluster drudge.) Very ho-hum and predictable.

Perhaps the larger disappointment is with how generic the Belfast landscape is. Although Laird is an Ulsterman and chooses the most emotionally charged an dangerous setting for a large section of his novel (the 12th of July!), this lawyer and his love cruise through the Belfast environs without ever seeing a bonfire, a police barricade, an armed standoff complete with watercanons and shockwalls, or any of the threatening mess that tends to mark this week each year. No, this couple motor around the area as if it were a forgetable spring day, and bar-hop through Belfast without seeing a paramilitary roadblock, any of the many shops annually boarded up by its owner in anticipation of the 12th, or even smelling the faint odor from a city full of bonfires.

With Nick Laird's novel 'Utterly Monkey', the post-Agreement depiction of Northern Ireland has arrived in print--and it has received the 'Rooney Prize for Irish Literature', the back cover informs me prominently. Its appearance as a paperback, has the addition of a feature I've never seen before in which there's not only background and interviews and two of his similarly prize-winning poems...but the contents of his desk, his most played I-tunes, and "Poems Attached by Blue-Tac to the Door of My Study" the latter three as of July 4, 2005. Laird's novel follows the dyspeptic detective send-ups of Colin Bateman, the considered meditations of Glenn Patterson--both Northern writers also continuing their explorations of their province as the Troubles subside, and like Robert MacLiam Wilson, he loves shenanigans enmeshing his likable protagonists who seem to take quite a bit from their creators.

What distinguishes Laird? First of all, he's over a decade younger than this trio. Born in 1975, by the time he came of age in Cookstown, the worst of the violence had begun to for the most part ease. Like MacLiam Wilson, he went to Cambridge. Unlike his predecessor, he did not drop out--shades of Ripley Bogle--but went on to a year at Harvard and six years practicing law in London. He chucked it all and took up writing. Now, I have to admit, since he's married to Zadie Smith, I'm not sure when this relationship started and how it influenced his decision. Certainly, however the situation, Laird has, like his wife, taken on today's London and, in his case, mixed it with a glance back at his native corner, still struggling to shake off the paras--now using drug moneys to fund their continued grievances and, in this novel, to carry off--on the Twelfth of July 2004--another 'spectacular'.

Laird's sketches of his native turf enrich what otherwise succeeds far more on characterisation than plot. While the caper entertained me, and its initial twists kept me up at nights eager to continue while not wanting the book to end too soon, as I kept reading, I began to grow disappointed. Still, I recommend it regardless of its too-pat ending and fluffy denouement. The climactic chase across the Millennium Bridge into the Tate Modern has 'screenplay' written all over it.

The people he conjures up, with a couple of notably static ones, mix satire's bite with reality's tang. They do seem only slightly larger than life. While Danny, the main character, seems perhaps too glaringly a stand-in for his harried solicitor-maker, and likewise his stunning black partner, Ellen, may be all too closely drawn from his wife, these comparisons are perhaps inevitable for a first novel. (As a professor once lectured to us, 'all first novels, or first books for that matter, are deep down autobiographical.')

But, with Ian, dispatched from 'the Organisation' to force the Crown to pay attention to its spurned suitor now languishing across the Irish Sea, Laird's command falters. There's one scene when Ian wanders about the zoo in Regent's Park that adds nothing but time-killing to the story as it nears its climax. Geordie, the unwitting mate of Danny who has to leave 'Ballyglass' suddenly when he stumbles upon the ill-got stash of 'the Organisation', and his girlfriend Janice do add texture to Laird's depiction of the recent past and the post-1998 Northern younger generation that still finds all too little to gainfully do amidst a changing environment, as the North faces a fast-charging economic invasion by British corporations.

Laird's insights, filtered through mainly Danny--who mirrors Laird's own trajectory for the most part--Geordie, and to a lesser extent Janice and Ian, establish the post-Agreement terrain in asides scattered through the novel. Never enough to pontificate, but sufficiently scattered to make 'Utterly Monkey' more than another generic trade paperback mass-market purchase to while away the hours in an airport or on a bus. (Excerpted from a review in the Belfast-based on-line journal "The Blanket".)

I found this a terrifickly well realized novel, driven less by plot than by the characters' ambivalent relationships to their various backgrounds, which collide in the life of the laconic, but sensitive, narrator. It's not lad lit as usual, but carefully staged observations about those things that swirl around and within us. The last few scenes contain, certainly, some of the weaker ones of the novel, but there's something of interest on every page. Laird's just a wonderful writer.

What's most distinctive about "Utterly Monkey" is its voice -detached and ironic, smirking, a bit boozy. Laird has a gift for quirky turns of phrase and idiomatic goofiness. The plot is of not much consequence, and character development is a fairly flat arc - there are interesting characterizations here but the novel's actors tend to blur into the same voice.

"Monkey" occasionally rises to level of quality writing, and Laird shows some serious promise.

I gladly give this book 4 stars because the descriptions are sometimes stunningly astute. A joy to read. Perhaps it's my age (60 year old female), but I found the "teenage boy" humor/jokes too infantile. A lawyer thinking and sometimes acting like a 12 year old does not work for me. However, the plot held together well and I will be ready to read Nick Laird's next book. Can't wait to see what brilliant, but subtle descriptions he uses next.

Danny thinks his life is pretty much stable. He has a good job in a big company, nice cozy flat and a good reliable car. Everything changes when his childhood friend appears at his door one day and overtakes his apartment as well as his life. The real fun just begins...
I though this book was very entertaining and full of comical events. I could not turn the pages fast enough.

The author, Nick Laird hails from Northern Ireland and worked as a lawyer before turning to writing full time. The protagonist of Utterly Monkey, Danny Williams, hails from Northern Ireland and works as a dissilusioned lawyer. Like many first novels, this one has more than a smidgin of the autobiographical about it.

Danny is 27 affable, handsome and a rising professional. He pursues the gorgeous Ellen, a black trainee in his law firm and seeks respite from the monotony of his job but this is hard when you are plagued by visits from old friends from flintier times in Northern Ireland who tell your would be girlfriend about the time you had intercourse with a girl immediately after she has excreted in an alleyway.

Linked in with all this is a complex crime plot revolving around a stolen £50,000 from loyalist terrorists culminating in a car chase through London with an unexploded bomb in a van. A car chase, I ask you - In a modern novel - What's the point of that when film does this thing much better? Utterly Monkey reads like a Guy Ritchie crime caper, but the problem with novels written with one eye on a screenplay is that the writing, in its novelistic vessel, invariably suffers.

The novel is high style lad lit. Mixed in with the Nick Hornby style narrative about young man trying to make his way in metropolitan London jungle are some fine phrases. Good descriptions of Magic Circle law life and a well done party and sex scene. Laird the poet comes out in occasional flashes, although his talent for metaphor hardly rivals masters such as Nabokov and Updike.

All in all. Not great. But Laird will surely improve in later works.

Having the pleasure (and no doubt embarassment) of being married to the most beautiful and famous novelist in London, Laird has no right to be this talented. What a debut novel! Wrongly dismissed as "lad lit" by stuffy critics, this shrewd and incisively written comedy of chickens coming home to roost is funny, compelling, craftily worded, but never ornate; the action flows fast but not fast enough to obscure Laird's sardonic skill, and the knowing details of slum life in Belfast and white-collar work in England. A terrific read-the most impressive debut I've seen in years.