Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About - Mil Millington

...I object to is when things leave funny behind and start becoming ridiculous. Sadly, that's what many parts of this novel are. To get so many amusing arguments out of a relatively mundane existence, some strange things have to happen with alarming regularity to ensure these arguments get started. Sadly, many of these things have to be totally ridiculous to get to that point.

With many novels, especially comedy style ones, there has ...
...humorous bloke-lit kind of novel, things start getting a little strange and the whole book takes a turn in the direction of being very silly.

However, even I, who objects to this kind of behaviour, found myself laughing frequently during the course of this book, nearly as much as I shook my head and thought how stupid a certain situation was. That might only be a 50% hit rate, but I've read and watched supposed comedies that have made ... more

Once upon a time, there were books. You bought them in bookshops. Then there was the internet. After this, there were websites from which you could buy books. Then, as websites started to become more popular and almost as a natural progression, there were websites that decided to release books or release their content in book form.

The Darwin Awards was possibly the first of these, a fun website that became a fun book (and, so far, three fun books), which weren't terribly readable in the normal way. More recently, Belle De Jour's "Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl" made it from weblog to hardback.

Somewhere in the middle of these two was Mil Millington's "Things my Girlfriend and I Have Argued About". This took a different approach to the two books previously mentioned. Belle De Jour's book was published first as an internet diary and was published as a diary in book form. The Darwin Awards was a site full of snippets of stories and was published as a book full of little snippets. The original ""Things my Girlfriend and I Have Argued About", however, was a website with funny snippets on it that have been shoehorned into a novel.

Pel Dalton lives somewhere in the North East with his German girlfriend Ursula and their two children. He works as the Supervisor for the Computer Team in the Learning Centre of the University of North-Eastern England. To all appearances, it sounds like a pretty normal life.

Indeed, it would be a pretty normal life, were it not for two important factors. The first is Pel's boss, TSR, who decides to do a rather rapid vanishing act, leaving Pel to pick up the pieces. The other is Ursula, the girlfriend of the book's title. Indeed, the title should give some idea as to their relationship, which revolves around disagreeing on a lot of things. Not just on the big things, either, like whether or not to buy a new house, but on the little things, like video games and the whereabouts of the car keys.

The problem with this book is that what worked so very well in short funny pieces simply doesn't lend itself to being a novel. In writing this book, Millington has changed the whole structure of what was a very funny idea to fit the medium and it simply doesn't work. This isn't to say that there aren't some very funny parts in the novel - rather worrying, the bit I laughed loudest at was an argument involving his penis - but the way it is all put together doesn't work for me.

I'm a big fan of funny things. With a reflection like mine staring back at me from the mirror every morning, I have to be. But what I object to is when things leave funny behind and start becoming ridiculous. Sadly, that's what many parts of this novel are. To get so many amusing arguments out of a relatively mundane existence, some strange things have to happen with alarming regularity to ensure these arguments get started. Sadly, many of these things have to be totally ridiculous to get to that point.

With many novels, especially comedy style ones, there has to be some suspension of disbelief. Frequently, you can achieve that and enjoy what's going on. With Millington's book, it's a problem largely because he's setting his life as being pretty normal within the first couple of chapters, albeit with amusing events. But just when you've started to believe you're possibly reading a gently humorous bloke-lit kind of novel, things start getting a little strange and the whole book takes a turn in the direction of being very silly.

However, even I, who objects to this kind of behaviour, found myself laughing frequently during the course of this book, nearly as much as I shook my head and thought how stupid a certain situation was. That might only be a 50% hit rate, but I've read and watched supposed comedies that have made me laugh less than this did. For all the rather shoddy window dressing this is a funny book, even if the website is a lot funnier, but it still provides entertainment and enjoyment. I found it infuriating as well as amusing, but that's not to say that you won't find it very funny and have to carry a spare set of underwear around with you while you read, just in case.

This can be a very funny book, but it can also be a very silly book. If you can deal with funny and silly all wrapped up together, you'll probably love this, especially at £6.39 from Amazon, £5.99 from Play.com and £3.75 from Green Metropolis. If you're a fan of funny and less so of silly, then you might still be amused with this, especially if you pay from only 50p from eBay or from 1p at the Amazon Marketplace. At least that way, if you don't enjoy the book, you can be amused by knowing you didn't pay as much for it as others have.

If you have no sense of humour at all, just go and have your own argument with your own girlfriend and leave the funny arguments to Mil Millington and people who'd appreciate them. 

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