Confessions of a GP: Benjamin Daniels

There's a bit of a trend at the moment for books based on blogs based on people's experiences of their jobs. Personally I blame Belle de Jour. At some point, it became very easy for the blog to become an ebook which might then even get a publishing deal. Since then, every teacher, policeman and binman has been regaling the world with their wit and wisdom and tales of the workplace. It's light reading and I've read a few. The quality is variable.

The main faults in this genre are:

a) Drivelling on about bits of your job which nobody gives a shit about. This usually manifests as a prolonged rant about forms, guidelines and accountability. While the red tape stuff may drive you a bit nuts, writing 200 pages on exactly how the system works isn't entertaining, and people are paying you to entertain them. If you think it's boring, I'm not sure why you'd expect readers to find it interesting. This is particularly the case where people have used the original blog as a way to let off steam about whatever it is they most hate in their job. Using a blog to let off steam is a valid way to do it, but again, a letting-off-steam-blog is very different from an entertaining-and-informing blog. The former really doesn't need to be made into a book for others to read.

b) Putting in stuff that you clearly didn't say or do, to make yourself look like "what Oscar Wilde would have been like had he worked as a paramedic." You clearly didn't think of that rejoinder at the time - that was something you came up with two weeks later in the canteen. That's fine, but don't think I can't tell that. Even worse, please don't finish a chapter with that line as a kind of "and I had the final word, bitches" thing. Generally, your witty oneliners wouldn't even be that impressive if you had actually said them.

c) Treating the people with whom you work with such utter disdain that you come across as unlikeable. I once came across the blog of a social worker who clearly hated every single one of his clients. Granted, it must be a frustrating job and some people must drive you nuts, but if you have that level of animosity it's time to find a new job, not write a whiny blog about the one you have.

So that's my general roundup of the genre. This is one of the better books in it, in fact. It's managed to avoid these flaws for the most part, which is a relief. This isn't an overly complicated book. It won't change your life. It is light reading and is mildly entertaining and funny in places. It gives you a little bit of insight into the world of a GP, and the guy is likeable enough. In a couple of places it's even laugh-out-loud funny and (a blessed relief, and very unusual for this kind of book) the author likes his job and doesn't feel hard done by.

Read this whilst lying in bed with flu: this is my recommendation.

The Unicorn Crisis (The Hidden Academy): Jon Rosenburg

Whenever you read about people writing novels and getting published, there are always mutters about the strange new phenomenon of self-publishing, which has only become a feasible marketing option (distinct from the vanity publishing of old) in recent years, with the advent of print-on-demand novels and e-readers. Naturally, there is some suspicion about this kind of publishing, since it involves doing without the paid services of all those fine people who proofread, check quality, support authors, make suggestions, remove rubbish chapters and tell the truly talentless to please abide by the restraining order. Self-published authors have a reputation for being the ones who are just not good enough to be published in a conventional way. I was curious to know if this was indeed the case, and as this book comes with excellent reviews on Amazon, keeps popping up as a recommendation next to books I love, and (perhaps most importantly) costs less than £1 to download, I thought I'd give it a go.

The first thing that hits is that it badly needs proper proofreading and editing. It's not that there are spelling mistakes everywhere but there are errors in punctuation on pretty much every page. There are many stylistic flaws which a decent copy editor would notice: run-on sentences, ambiguous sentences, sentences which throw in a completely redundant repetition of the one before. This kind of thing happens too often:

"After all, my master had been born when Henry VIII was on the throne and by Llewellyn's standards he'd still been fairly young when he'd died, earlier this year, but I wasn't entirely convinced that he was telling the truth about that."

(And by too often, I mean it happens at all.) Okay, I think I can figure out what he means by that sentence, but I do need to figure it out, and that shouldn't be the case. At first glance it looks as though Henry VIII died earlier this year and then had the nerve to come back and lie about it.

It's not formatted as a novel, either: usually in a novel the paragraphs are indented rather than double spaced, unless the author is trying to convey some kind of hiatus in the action which is somewhere between a new paragraph and a new chapter. That's not so much of an issue except it suggests that the author doesn't know how a novel should be formatted. Which in turn suggests that he doesn't know much about novels. Which doesn't inspire much confidence. It also means that the pages start flying by at a speed which becomes annoying whenever there's a lengthy conversation.

The next mistake which is made is throwing in new characters one after another. Each character is given a name, role, and physical description, but I'm pretty sure that most of these characters are not very important. This is just as well, because most are annoying. The thug has to say "fuck" in every sentence, just as the Welsh elf has to say "boyo" in every sentence. And then some historical chappie goes for: "Amorous Christina, it is well that you should so converse with us, perhaps a dalliance as in days gone by?"

OH SHUT UP ALREADY. YOU CAN'T DO REGIONAL VOICES OR HISTORICAL VOICES. PLEASE STOP TRYING.

Amazon reviews are full of people saying things like "I never normally read fantasy but I thought I'd try this one. Whoever thought of Welsh elves? Marvellous!" Well, actually, there's a massive genre out there which does exactly this kind of thing. All the time. Much better than Rosenburg manages. It's difficult to be different from everyone else in this genre, but here's a piece of advice: if you're going for the "silly fantasy" genre, avoid using "The Hidden Academy" as the title for your series, unless you're really fine with every single reader going:

"Hang on, aren't those two words basically synonyms for  'unseen' and 'university'? Haven't I heard of that somewhere?"

In all, I'd say that this author obviously has some creativity in him, but most of what is good in this book has been done better elsewhere, and most of what is bad really shouldn't have made it past the first draft. He needs to go away and read a lot more and study the craft of writing, and come back in a few years. I'd like to say that he's not doing the reputation of self-published authors any favours but by all accounts he's one of the better ones. God help us.

Rivers of London: Ben Aaronovitch

I'm a sucker for the old Amazon recommendations. I read a lot of different stuff, so sometimes they get a bit confused. That said, when someone I've never heard of shows up I generally pay at least some attention. When it's an "if you like X, you'll probably like Y" I pay more attention. And so, faced with "if you like Neil Gaiman, you'll probably like Ben Aaronovitch" I nodded my appreciation and downloaded this little beauty of a book.

"Rivers of London" (which you should read, by the way, so I'll try to avoid too many spoilers) is the first in what may turn out to be a lengthy series following the adventures of Peter Grant, a regular West End policeman. As it opens, he's guarding a police line at the scene of a murder, when he runs into a ghost. This leads to a chance meeting with Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, and culminates in Grant becoming an apprentice wizard at The Folly, which is the section of the Met responsible for all things magical and supernatural. In the events that follow, he has to get to the bottom of a series of bloody murders involving many people's faces falling off. He also has to track down and kill a few vampires (of the non sparkly variety) and sort out a long running feud between the god and goddess who are in charge of different bits of the Thames. It's very witty, very creepy in places, and pretty much unputdownable. I attempted to get into two other books after reading this one, before saying "sod it" and downloading the sequel (which is called "Moon Over Soho" - don't go for "Midnight Riot" as this is merely the American title of "Rivers of London". Book 3 to come out next year dammit).

The book is clearly very well researched. Every detail about London is spot on, as far as I know. Most of the places within this book (and even more so in the case of the sequel) do actually exist, in the streets where they are supposed to be, and the interiors are accurate. Aaronovitch can sum up a whole area of London in a few pithy sentences. In "Moon Over Soho" he has some rather unflattering comments to make about Cheam, which were nonethelesss hilarious. Given that this is the case I suspect that his research into the workings of the Met is probably pretty accurate too, although obviously I don't know so much about this, being a small felt car.

The one thing which I don't like (and this is a very minor quibble) is the sometimes desperate self-referential attempts to be very clear that this is Not Like Other Urban Fantasy. It's unecessary, distracting and to be honest simply reminds you of parallels rather than distracting you. Like this (p45)

"So magic is real," I said. "Which makes you a. . . what?"

"A wizard."

"Like Harry Potter?"

Nightingale sighed. "No," he said, "not like Harry Potter."

"In what way?"

"I'm not a fictional character," said Nightingale.

Cringe. Not only is that a lamearse attempt to differentiate the two, put in for the benefit of the reader, but immediately you're set thinking "is this like Harry Potter? Is it a Pottery ripoff?" And the annoying thing is, it really isn't much like Harry Potter at all. It's certainly not a children's book, for one thing, and it has more in common with a regular thriller, but this exchange drags you out of an immersive storyline, reminds you that Nightingale is a fictional character, gets you to run a swift comparison and then when you're thoroughly distracted, lets you jump back in. Like I say, it's a minor quibble, and probably wouldn't annoy me if I didn't like the book so much.

Enough quibbling though. Truly it is an awesome read. Go forth and enjoy.