The New Republic
Fat and ostracized as a kid, Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. Bored rigid by his pedestrian life as a solicitor, Edgar decides to risk everything on trying to make it as a journalist. When he’s offered the post of foreign correspondent in Barba – a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a homegrown terrorist movement – Edgar leaps at the chance to replace some pretentious blowhard called ‘Barrington Saddler’ who’s disappeared. But as Edgar learns more about his posting, and his larger-than-life predecessor, the more he realizes that it’s not Barban terrorism he’s covering; it’s Barrington Saddler. Edgar recognizes Saddler as exactly the outsize character he longs to emulate. Infuriatingly, all his fellow journalists cannot stop talking about the beloved ‘Bear,’ who is no longer lighting up their work lives. Yet all is not as it appears. Os Soldados Ousados de Barba (‘The Daring Soldiers of Barba’) have been blowing up the rest of the world for years. So why, with Barrington vanished, do terrorist incidents claimed by the “SOB” suddenly dry up?
2.4 out of 5 based on 9 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
400 |
| RRP |
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| Date of Publication |
June 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-0007459803 |
| Publisher |
Harper Collins |
| |
Fat and ostracized as a kid, Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. Bored rigid by his pedestrian life as a solicitor, Edgar decides to risk everything on trying to make it as a journalist. When he’s offered the post of foreign correspondent in Barba – a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a homegrown terrorist movement – Edgar leaps at the chance to replace some pretentious blowhard called ‘Barrington Saddler’ who’s disappeared. But as Edgar learns more about his posting, and his larger-than-life predecessor, the more he realizes that it’s not Barban terrorism he’s covering; it’s Barrington Saddler. Edgar recognizes Saddler as exactly the outsize character he longs to emulate. Infuriatingly, all his fellow journalists cannot stop talking about the beloved ‘Bear,’ who is no longer lighting up their work lives. Yet all is not as it appears. Os Soldados Ousados de Barba (‘The Daring Soldiers of Barba’) have been blowing up the rest of the world for years. So why, with Barrington vanished, do terrorist incidents claimed by the “SOB” suddenly dry up?
So Much For All That by Lionel Shriver
We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Reviews
The Financial Times
Michael Prodger
“Shriver’s Barba is a wonderful creation. She has tacked a peninsula on to the bottom of Portugal and made it a place of inbred stupidity, free of culture, charm and even proper architecture. Swept by a permanent sirocco – o vento insano – its only product is the pera peluda, the hairy pear, a malodorous fruit from which is brewed a beer so vile that when Edgar first tasted it his “oral membrane had constricted into a dry pucker, like mouth eczema” ... It is a measure of Shriver’s panache that while her philosophical points are an integral ingredient in her blending of caper, thriller and psychological study, they still retain the pungency of a pera peluda.”
30/03/2012
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The Sunday Times
Adam Lively
“The New Republic stands at the confluence of a number of fine comic traditions. There’s the satire on journalistic incompetence that stretches back to Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, with the sharply characterised Barba hack-pack swallowing Saddler’s hoax (now perpetuated by Edgar) hook, line and sinker. There’s the excruciating elaboration of a place you would never want to spend your holidays, as in Malcolm Bradbury’s Why Come to Slaka? ... All this might seem like saying that The New Republic is unoriginal. But originality is not everything in comedy — the best jokes have a history, and a writer’s skill in this department more often than not lies in the strategic application of spit and polish. ”
17/06/2012
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The Times
Kate Saunders
“A superbly witty political satire.”
16/06/2012
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The Daily Mail
Harry Ritchie
“The misanthropic Edgar stars in a novel which offers an odd but typically Shriverian mix. It has a lively cast of strong characters and a story that rattles along, and it’s written with intelligence, wit and pizzazz. But it’s also too long by half and is basically and repeatedly implausible, and it relies on an apparition to move the plot along.”
31/05/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Robert Epstein
“The novel's premise is intriguing: Edgar Kellogg, a lawyer-turned-journalist, is sent to cover a god-forsaken region at the southern tip of Portugal, where a terrorist group is campaigning for "freedom" with indiscriminate bombings. Kellogg is there to replace the larger-than-life Barrington Saddler, who has, suspiciously, gone missing. But the conceit is let down by unconvincing characters whose idiosyncrasies seem driven by the plot rather than drivers of it. The novel is overwritten, overlong and overly pleased with a twist that is telegraphed so unsubtly that it's hard to get excited about it.”
10/06/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Lucy Daniel
“Edgar is objectionable without being compelling. He is a misanthrope, and Shriver is excellent at writing about misanthropy, but the attempt to make him roguishly lovable entails, for instance, a fellow journo called Alexis who wears a trouser suit being nicknamed “Alesbo”. If we are meant to be amused by his crasser moments, being borderline misogynist certainly doesn’t make us give a toss what happens to him, which, since he is the central character, is a wound from which no novel can recover.”
03/08/2012
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The Guardian
Joan Smith
“The novel is poorly constructed, relying on stagey devices and a deus ex machina when the plot reaches what might otherwise have been an impasse. Shriver says nothing new about journalism or terrorism, and it isn't a surprise to discover that the novel was actually written before the 9/11 attacks.”
23/07/2012
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The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
“In creating this ramshackle plot, Ms. Shriver has pilfered an assortment of elements from various classics — a feckless, put-upon hero from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, a send-up of journalism from Waugh’s Scoop, and a fun-loving ghost from the movie Topper — but she never welds them into anything coherent, compelling or remotely original. As for Ms. Shriver’s own gift for psychological portraiture — demonstrated with such élan in We Need to Talk About Kevin and So Much for That — it is completely absent from these pages, drowned out by her flailing efforts to write satire ... ghastly.”
26/03/2012
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The Guardian
Scarlett Thomas
“This preposterous, unengaging and extremely dull novel comes with an author's note explaining why it failed to find a publisher after its completion in 1998. Shriver attributes this to a "poisonous" sales record and an American ambivalence to books about terrorism (before 9/11, terrorism was, apparently, "Foreigners' Boring Problem"; afterwards, of course, the reverse), but it seems clear that in fact it wasn't published then because it is a bad book.”
08/06/2012
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