The Crow Road is about about Prentice McHoan’s preoccupation with death, sex, his relationship with his father, unrequited love, sibling rivalry, a missing uncle, cars, alcohol and other intoxicants, and God, against the background of the Scottish landscape. And doesn’t that just sound like so much fun? Or maybe just a Scottish take off on Nine’s “Folies Bergeres”
Necrophorus: The trouble with Contini, he’s the king of
mediocrities,
A second-rate director who believes that he is
Socrates.
He never makes a “movie” or a “picture?” or a “flick”
He makes a “film”-get it? -a “film”.
A typical Italian with his auto and biography,
A mixture of Catholicism, pasta, and pornography,
A superficial, womanizing, moderately charming Latin
fraud.
Guido Grazie!
Necrophorus Prego!
And what are his movies about?
Just beauty, truth, death, youth, love, life,
anguish, angst.
Thanks to him we have boredom at the movies.
I first became aware of it when it appeared in the Season Two Finale of Good Omens; I became curious (especially when it was stated how much Crow Road echoed the events of the finale) and picked up a copy. And then had it sit in my TBR pile for years because I kept having traumatic flashbacks to that ending and didn’t need to be reminded of it. Then it got buried, other books took preference, and I didn’t get around to reading it until recently. And after all that waiting?
Well, this will teach me not to read books just because they’re featured in a TV series I like. Every blurb on the book covers and inside wax on poetically about how absolutely hysterical this is; I guess the reviewers and I have vastly different senses of humor. Very few of the characters were likable; maybe Ashley (Prentice’s friend) and Mary (Prentice’s mother). The others were either not overly likable, more caricatures than characters, or so barely fleshed out that they’re not really worth mentioning. The writing was disjointed, and to be frankly honest, at times boring. Popping back and forth between past and present and various points of view for the sole purpose of supplying necessary information that (I suppose) couldn’t be given any other way was “meh”. Slightly confusing at first, and then just “wow. another point of view; no wait, it’s someone we’ve read before, what fun.”
I suppose you could say the book was written as a book about a book in a book? You had the book, and then you realize that large parts of it were actually parts of a play/book/tv program/poetry/whatever that Prentice’s uncle Rory was writing put forth as parts of the narrative; to be honest it was as confusing and difficult to read as this sentence is. I also know that the plot of the book seemed to shift about halfway through from a perpetual clusterf**k and his floating through life to some big familial mystery that he stumbles across and becomes obsessed with. Which as readers, we’ve been aware of for half the book and are just waiting around to care about it, or anything else. As for me, I never did. I mean, it started out so strong with the scene of his grandmother exploding in the crematorium (and won’t that teach people to make sure all medical devices are removed before crematory arrangements?), and then it just careened so fast downhill from there.
The entire thing just gave me the impression that Iaian Banks was not only extremely impressed with himself, but found himself both utterly fascinating and unbearably amusing, believed everyone else did as well, but wasn’t too bothered if they didn’t. I suppose Prentice and Lewis (Prentice’s older brother) were supposed to be his avatars, with his personality divided between the two of them; the snarky drunk who thinks everyone finds him hip and quirky and likable (tbh, reminds me a bit of David Spade) and almost nobody does, and the comic who finds himself hilarious, and some people (frequently the not too bright) do as well. all I could think of was that Good Omens was accurate to include this book in Season 2, because it did remind me of the book Good Omens, specifically the conversation between Crowley and the fireman outside Aziraphale’s bookshop.
What did I see when I finished The Crow Road and thought of the author? A prat.