Books
REVIEW
Biting satire takes a skewer to publishing’s most pompous
It’s a brave and undoubtedly foolish author who produces a novel that is in effect a declaration of war on the entire publishing industry. Not one who values career longevity, say, or a future of cosy, drunken lunches on expense accounts, or, like, actually getting his books published.
Dan Rhodes is such a man, and thank heaven for him. Rhodes is disillusioned and slightly nuts but also a loveable enigma. One of the funniest writers in Britain today, he’s a satirist who aims squarely at the pompous, the priggish and the over-promoted, and a tonic in an era of wearyingly short, spare, production-line novels excavating the somewhat limited contents of a twentysomething’s life.
It’s six years since Rhodes’s last comic masterpiece, When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow, which took the humourless Richard Dawkins as its subject of mockery. The targets in Sour Grapes, his latest release, are equally delicious and deserving.
