A delight.

----------------------

Added after reading Manny's review of this book and having but one vote for my own...

NGE sits despondently on park bench, thinking:

If each two words of a review get one vote, then Manny is going to get 346.5 votes.

And let's face it, he only gave me that one so that I'd go and look at his.

Fuck.

---------------

I can't help adding something to this review, since I do think in Mr Phillips ways from time to time. Have you ever thought about how much time women spend putting on makeup? Well, if you spent an hour a day (this includes putting it on and off) for 50 years - in fact most women would spend many more years than that, since they start as children and stick to it until death - but say one hour a day, fifty years, that is TWO YEARS of your life you have spent doing nothing but putting shit on your face!!!!

Is that not the most amazing statistic?

I do sometimes imagine the things I will regret on my deathbed. I would be so, so bitter to have realised as I lay thinking about all the things I hadn't had time for, that I had spent two precious years poisoning my skin and spending lots of money on it.

What a fucking idiotic thing to do. Makeup.


( )

I liked this. Reminded me of Next or Saturday - novels where the course of the action is told over a single day and where an act of violence steers the day in a particular direction. Beautifully written. ( )

An entertaining and slightly surreal dreamscape of London life, statistics, sex and accounts, telling the tale of a man discovering new aspects of the city on his first day after being made redundant. ( )

This is one day in the life of a man who wanders around London, having just been made redundant.

You very quickly get into the "stream of consciousness" style of writing where you get the impression that you are reading everything that occurs to Mr Phillips without any filter. Fortunately, it is very funny and absorbing. Scarily, it is probably quite accurate about what goes through a 50 year old man's mind.

I was totally caught up in this and read the book really quickly. Part of me was silently screaming "you must go home and tell your wife, you can't do this again tomorrow" but the rest of me was happy to enjoy the distractions Mr Phillips found.

I read this because I enjoyed John Lanchester's more recent book Capital. Mr Phillips is a very different style of book but still great fun. ( )

Funny and unusual novel that traces the day in the life of an accountant who heads off on Monday but doesn't go to work. Really enjoyed it as with The Debt to Pleasure, Lanchester is able to conjure up a unique voice. I raced through it in a few hours. ( )