Second in the dodecology. It didn’t make me rant as much as the first one, but it wasn’t as interesting either. Since it was basically three, possibly more, parties, a wedding and a funeral, I was trying to amuse myself by figuring out which character was Hugh Grant. But I haven’t come to a conclusion yet, I’m probably going to read the next one soon so it’s certainly an angle to bear in mind. There were certainly more roles for Charlotte Coleman here too, which can only be a good thing. In this book women get to throw sugar shakers over men and have hushed abortions which is considerably more animation than they had in the first, though they are still made of cardboard and the abortion is only imagined to be a disaster for the male half of the couple. There might have been a hint of homosexuality, I identified this by two of the characters popping into three dimensions for about a page. I thought the narrator was going to find himself a wife for a minute but not yet. I’d say he’s still too vapid for that yet but I don’t feel like he’s going to find any more substance in the series.

There are good lines here though and I did really like the closing paragraph where the narrator notices that “there are specific occasions when events begin to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last”.