In "The Telegraph" Ali Smith reviews the new DBC Pierre: "Reading Ludmila's Broken English, the new novel from D.B.C. Pierre who won the 2003 Man Booker with his first novel, Vernon God Little, is like being hit over the head with a giant hammer, then hit again." Which gives you the impression she doesn't like it - then again maybe she has something about hammers. Anyway, the the review ends with telling you what else to expect, rather than making a definitive statement as to its worth: "Don't expect too high an art here. Don't expect a story. Expect the baroque. Expect slapstick and speed, funny and obscene, and a near-gorgeous overwrite out of which come occasional moments of shocking loss and beauty." Or did I miss something.
In the same paper, Tim Flannery considers The Devil's Picnic by Taras Grescoe, who "squanders the opportunity to
write an important book", and then has his own volume, The Weather Makers,
href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;jsessionid=U5AMECKXCFQBLQFIQMFSFFOAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/arts/2006/03/12/bofla12.xml&sSheet=/arts/2006/03/12/bomain.html">reviewed by Susan Elderkin who finds that "what makes this book especially useful is its
multi-disciplinary approach".
Back home in "The Bulletin", James Bradley has a gander at the new Pierre: "Ludmila, for all its moral fury and flashes of genuine hilarity, is a curiously enervating experience. The book never quite knows when to stop, the characters possessed of a crazed loquacity which drowns out the wit which crackles between the lines"; Robin Wallace-Crabb reviews The Bone House by Beverley Farmer: "The book's four essays push language to that cliff edge, testing its ability to deal with all that a person's sensory equipment is receiving from life"; and Peter Pierce skims over Passarola Rising by Azhar Abidi and
Annabel Smith's A New Map of the Universe: "Both novels are confident performances, giving the perhaps illusory notion that foundations have firmly been laid for fictional excursions to come."
