Contacts, by Mark Watson

ISBN: 9780008346997
Amazon ID: B07YXBL15S

Part One (chapters 1-10 of 34) is a mish-mash of different people's thoughts and recollections about the central character, James.

It really is a mish-mash, though - there's no coherence to it, no continuity (other than timeline), and no feeling of progress in the story as you read more of it.

It's just like "oh, this person reacts in this way" and then "ah, that person thinks this", followed by "someone we've never heard of before does something".

They're all people with some connection to the central character, but nothing holds the narrative together - nothing helps the reader to feel "okay, this happened, now what happens next?" because what happens next has no relationship at all to what just happened in the previous chapter.

It's a hard book to get involved with.

Part Two (chapters 11-16) gives us more background about James and a few of the more significant people in his life, but it still doesn't really feel like "a story" - it's more like a documentary about some random person.

Part Three (chapters 17-34).

I know that's not a sentence, but the way this book is going, I don't care.

Getting through one chapter after another feels somewhat like the overweight person doing a 5 km run (referred to in the book) - it's the sort of thing other people do three times a week, it's not an incredible distance, and yet it's hard work, and you end up on your hands and knees at the end of it. Reading a book shouldn't be as difficult or tedious as this one is, but there's no sense of "what happens next? I want to know more" in it.

As the book draws to its end, you learn a bit more about how useless, or disappointed (sometimes both), some of the other characters are, but there's still no sense of it being an interesting story, or of having any particular coherence to it.

The final scenes are improbable, and leave you with the feeling that the author wanted something unexpected to happen at the end, but couldn't work out a plausible way to make the story work like that.

This is a chapter which doesn't bring anything together; doesn't tell you how things worked out "after all" or "in the end". It should just have been chapter 35 at the end of Part Three.

We're really no wiser about James at the end of the book than we were in the middle.

Amazon describes this book as "From the award-winning comedian, the most heartwarming, touching and funny fiction book."

It's not heartwarming, it's depressing. Towards the end you start to feel like considering suicide yourself.

It's not funny, in the slightest. Many of the characters are depressing, depressed, useless or pathetic. They don't do or say funny things, funny things don't happen to them, and you're left with a feeling of "why am I reading about these people?"

The sales blurb is a complete con.

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