Books like Incredible Bodies

First, let me say that I read The North Water prior to this, and thought it was fantastic. Furthermore, I work in academia and love comic novels, so I’m presumably the ideal audience for this campus romp. As such, it gives me no pleasure to say that this is a bad book. Why is it bad? Well, for one thing the plot is preposterous and driven by actions totally contrary to the characters’ established natures and basically discordant with human nature in general. You know the feeling you get when struck by some observation that rings gorgeously true? This book bombards you with the exact opposite feeling – eliciting (in me anyway) groans and eye rolls and winces and various other more subtle twitches and expressions of dismay. It reads like an open guitar chord played on the wrong fret. This wrongness greatly hinders the humour in Incredible Bodies, too. The author is not the unfunniest writer I’ve read, by any stretch – there are several amusing lines in these 372 pages – but the humour I prefer depends on subtlety and truth and the constraints of realistic characters, and none of these elements are consistently present here. If you like farcical, madcap type humour, then maybe you’ll find more to laugh at than I did. The language, which is brilliant and evocative in The North Water, here ranges from amateurish to bland to quite good. Easily the most annoying tic of the author is his habit of every few pages inserting the sentence “X smelt of Y and Z”, where X is usually a person and Y and Z are, respectively, the person’s last meal and some random other thing (like ‘tarmac’, for example). One wonders whether the author is some sort of super-smeller who experiences his surroundings like a dog, or whether he has taken too literally advice to describe every scene using all five senses for optimal vividness. Incidentally, the olfactory stuff really worked in The North Water, in which he discovered other sentence constructions to describe smells, and where you could imagine the whaling ship being highly and relevantly odorous. I’m glad I didn’t read Incredible Bodies first, though, because it probably would have tarnished The North Water. All in all, I made it to the last page, which means the book can’t have been that bad, since I don’t finish most that I start. It’s tolerable. That’s about all I can say for it. Kudos to the author for regrouping for his awesome follow-up.