London Bridges

Rating:
Summary: Suprisingly amateurish
Review: I was surprised at just how poorly written this humorless little book is. Ms. Stevenson is an established author and a professor, so it pains me to say that London Bridges has the distinct whiff of Creative Writing 101. Perhaps she is trying to prove a point about the state of British publishing by passing off one of her students' fumbling attempts as a real book. The plot could be very interesting, but is completely undermined by laughable dialogue and cartoonish characters. Though I am glad I only checked it out from the library, the 25 cent late fee was perhaps too much to pay for this slush pile dreck.

Rating:
Summary: [e-mail]
Review: London has long been an international city and, in London Bridges, Jane Stevenson is keen to show just how networked it, and its inhabitants are. Geographically London spans the globe in this short novel and, on a temporal plane, London reaches through history. At the heart of the novel is, Eugenides, a Greek lawyer, an aging gentleman of the old school, with ties to an ancient Greek Monastery. He has in his possession rare manuscripts, and within his power of attorney, access to priceless relics over which he is charged to supervise at the request of his monastic clients. With all these qualifications, he is a natural target for con-artists. In no time, they find him, and the effort to swindle commences. Stevenson's London is magnetic: a visiting Australian student, a London lawyer of Indian descent, Greek monks and Greek crooks, a British scholar of ancient Greece, Brits residing in France: all, and others besides, play key roles in Stevenson's novel. There are times in London Bridges when I felt that Stevenson was losing control -- when the novel's complex plot had kidnapped the writer. "Meanwhile, on Saturday of that week, Hattie rang Sebastian." "Edward, meanwhile, had entered a stage of abject, bowel-liquidising terror..." "Meanwhile in Islington, Hattie Luck was getting ready to go to a party." "Jeanne, meanwhile, had troubles of her own." Meanwhile the reader is tossed around like the hapless tourist in a Puerta Vallarta cab. One advantage of the plot, with its "meanwhile-back-at-the-ranch" tempo, is that it does move the novel along. As does the prose, for Ms. Stevenson does not squander words. Ms. Stevenson's novel shows us a London at once vast and knowable. She merits a wide readership, especially among those of us who call other cities home, but who retain connections to that most international of capitals.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointingly pretentious
Review: With a potentially interesting range of characters and a complex plot, I had high hopes for this book, but it let me down badly. The characters are little better than two-dimensional stereotypes, and most of them basically unlikeable stereotypes at that. There are pages and pages of useless dialogue about unrelentingly pretentious topics that are totally irrelevant to the plot. Such as it is. During the supposedly dramatic finale I fell asleep several times due to the long-winded and poorly-paced description of events. I got no sense of danger or excitement and amazingly, considering how bad the rest of the book was, the end was an anti-climax. The only thing that would have saved it would have been if one of the obnoxious heroes had been killed. No book has annoyed me so much for years. Not since the equally terrible My Legendary Girlfriend. My advice is only read this if you enjoy the company of excessively smug intellectuals. And one more thing: her knowledge of London geography is patchy at best. Do not use it as a travel guide.