Not been on here for a long while - got some catching up to do...!
Not been on here for a long while - got some catching up to do...!
Member since:01.09.2004
Reviews:201
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James Herbert has always ranked amongst my top three favourite authors. For a long time, Herbert was second only to Stephen King, but more lately Dean Koontz has taken over that mantel.
For me, however, Herbert's ranking in my own personal list of "world's best authors" is steadily slipping. Many of Herbert's earlier novels (such as The Rats, The Fog, Shrine, The Magic Cottage) or those of a few years later (Sepulchre, Creed, Portent etc.) are some of the best novels in the horror genre ever written. More recently, though, I'm finding that Herbert's novels don't match up to the quality of those in his earlier years. While authors such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz seem to be going from strength to strength (the latter more prominently than the former), James Herbert seems to be going the other way.
The author has always had a propensity towards the sexual side of his characters' lives, the bondage scene in Creed a good example, but recently Herbert's novels have erred to include more sex than is perhaps necessary. Once, for example, seems to have been more of an excuse to write a softcore porn story disguised as a Fairy Tale than anything else, and whilst Herbert seems to have been trying to move away from the 'horror' tag such a novel seemed completely arbitrary.
So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Nobody
True. And the opening line: "I wasn't there when I died." followed by the paragraph: "Really. I wasn't. And finding my body dead came as a shock. Hell, I was horrified, lost, couldn't understand what the fuck had happened." did little to inspire me. Still, I was without a novel to read, so I got on with the job at hand and have to say I struggled.
Whilst I might not have enjoyed James Herbert's more recent works, his narrative has always been enjoyable and his writing style always readable. But Nobody True seems to be made up of a barrage of stop-start sentences and paragraphs full of repetition.
The premise of the book is simple: narrator or hero, however you want to view them, is able to have Out of Body Experiences, or OBEs as they quickly become abbreviated. On one such OBE, James True returns to his body only to find it horrifically mutilated, lying face down on the bed in an ocean of blood. Because of the OBE, Jim becomes something of a spirit, able to move around unseen but unable to pass on to the next life. In a story reminiscent of Herbert's fourth novel, Fluke, where the narrator finds himself reincarnated as a dog, this book trudges around the life of James True, stuck in the real world unable to get to the next life, but seemingly unable to do anything about it and unable to help find the person who's taken his life.
The character's murder is similar to that of a serial killer who has been prowling the streets of London, but with one significant difference. The police have been withholding some information from the press to ensure copycat killers are easily identified, and they quickly ascertain that this is a copycat killing. Evidently there's a twist in the plot coming and the reader is left trying to figure it out. Sadly, for this novel, the story is so uninspiring that trying to work out whether it's Jim True's business partner, his accountant, his mother or his wife who has killed him takes up more of the reader's brain power than actually taking in the story itself.
And then there's the repetition.
Oh, have I said that before? Sorry, I was trying to get my point across.
The fact is this: apparently, when you're a spirit you're unable to judge time. You have no idea whether it's four in the afternoon or four in the morning. You can't discern how long it has taken you to float from one side of London to the other. Time is a strange dimension… and on and on and on about time and how it's difficult to assess when you're a spirit. I mean, come on. Even Herbert appeared to be getting a little bored of it: later in the novel he actually makes some reference to banging on about time over and over again. And why you can't tell the difference between 4.a.m. and 4.p.m. is beyond me - surely, even as a spirit, you can tell whether the sun is up or down?
Then there are the footnotes. You expect to find footnotes in educational works, scientific works, essays and other academic works, but it's rare to find them in a fictional novel. Yet here they are, littering page after page with their inanity. What is a footnote? Strictly speaking, it is a note placed at the bottom of a page of a book or manuscript that comments on or cites a reference for a designated part of the text. In a non-fictional work it can be quite handy, but in a fictional piece it is very difficult to utilise as it detracts from the main story and if you can't get your point across eloquently in your prose, a footnote is just going to make it more difficult. Let's have a look at the footnote on page 142 of the paperback version of Nobody True, for example: *Time is a funny thing in this strange dimension I'd found myself inhabiting…
And so on. See? He's still banging on about time, and this time he's had to take it out of the main text into a footnote in an attempt to get his point across. The first footnote occurs on page 8 of the paperback release; the last occurs on page 471 of a 503-page novel. Honestly, it made the whole story drag.
The sex is in the book too. This time Herbert turns his hand to necrophilia, the erotic attraction to - or sexual contact with - corpses. Enough already. It is ultimately the necrophilia that helps lead our narrator to a solution to his problem, so Herbert has kept in context with his story, but I just think he could have found another way to do it.
Whilst Stephen King's recent novel The Cell is a modern day take on his earlier novel The Stand it is still an excellent novel in its own right; Herbert's retake on Fluke in Nobody True falls flat on its face.
James Herbert's latest novel, The Secrets of Crickley Hall, comes out in October. For the first time in my adult life, I might not put a Herbert novel on my letter to Santa. I can probably guess what Crickley Hall's secrets are, and as the synopsis for this forthcoming novel make it sound like a remake of Stephen King's The Shining I don't think I'm going to be able to give it much time…
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
The title Nobody True is a complicated set of puns on its own plot; adman Jimmy True has ... more
no body because he was off on one of his regular astral jaunts when someone stuck him through the heart and carved him up like meat. His rather privileged position...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
The titleNobody Trueis a complicated set of puns on its own plot; adman Jimmy True has no ... more
body because he was off on one of his regular astral jaunts when someone stuck him through the heart and carved him up like meat. His rather privileged position a...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
The title Nobody True is a complicated set of puns on its own plot; adman Jimmy True has ... more
no body because he was off on one of his regular astral jaunts when someone stuck him through the heart and carved him up like meat. His rather privileged position...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
The titleNobody Trueis a complicated set of puns on its own plot; adman Jimmy True has no ... more
body because he was off on one of his regular astral jaunts when someone stuck him through the heart and carved him up like meat. His rather privileged position a...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
The titleNobody Trueis a complicated set of puns on its own plot; adman Jimmy True has no ... more
body because he was off on one of his regular astral jaunts when someone stuck him through the heart and carved him up like meat. His rather privileged position a...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Aug 13th, 2006
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