|
If you like clichés, one-dimensional characters, unrealistic dialogue, inconsequential stories, saccharin-sweet sentimentality and repetition, then this is the book for you. Alternatively, you can read the book, as I did, during a bout of fever and let Gervase Phinn's aimless meanderings rev up your delirium. It's a rare author who can achieve what Gervase Phinn has done in creating the characters of his colleagues - men who bicker so tediously the the reader finds himself fast-forwarding to the end of their conversation in the certain knowledge that he will not have missed anything either important or amusing. A previous reviewer notes that the funniest moment, the summit of Phinn's comedic art, was an epidemic of head-lice. That really says it all about the comic achievements of "Over Hill and Dale". And thoe characters. The men are infantile. The women are either harridans or as wet as Yorkshire puddles. (The exception, a sassy female school inspector, is wheeled on for the sake of a painfully-predictable little pseudo-feminist anecdote and then disappears from view for the rest of the book.) The narrator himself comes across as a naive prig. I tried reading short passages aloud to myself, in order to understand why "Over Hill and Dale" was so popular when on the radio. And indeed, when you slow the prose down to speaking pace the bombardment of of clichés becomes more tolerable. So, in the desire to conclude on a positive note, let it be recorded that I can not recommend this book too strongly to slow readers.
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada