This book is kind of impressively bad.
It’s impressive in the sense that it’s just obviously not a good novel and is difficult to read as a consequence of audacious of author choices that are done for a purpose, and are clearly part of that purpose but otherwise are not fun, good, or interesting to read.
Let me explain. This is a satirical detective novel lampooning 1920s and 1930s estate manor mysteries like Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. It’s from 1933 and so it’s early in this wave of writing, some ten or so years after the first Agatha Christie novel. The narrator Zarl Osterley is told to come to a country house and “Bring the Monkey” with her. This starts of the rest of the satire.
Like a lot of satire, and the kind of satire where the focus is mockery and not gentle ribbing, it relies so heavily on your wanting to read a breakdown of the genre and not someone playing around with form. So all the characters’ names are so ridiculous, that it’s hard to even keep reading them and find some kind of narrative rhythm moving forward. And the consequence of this is that a short “funny” book is difficult to get through.
I think a great satire is more like a Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, Cabin in the Woods, etc. These are great parodies of the genre and competently perform the genre, not just deconstruct it. This book is closer to Edward St Aubyn’s Lost for Words, which completely takes the Booker Prize to task for its backroom politics, backstabbing, and utter shamelessness. He’s not trying to write a good “prizeworthy” book, but cut cut cut. And so the success of that book is entirely dependent on how much you agree with the vision. Same for this one.
It’s a shame, because I really like My Brilliant Career by this same author — a hilarious book about growing up in the Australian bush. I would stick with that one.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Bring-Monkey-Miles-Franklin/dp/1612035310/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1550675478&sr=8-1-fkmrnull)