The Ways of the World - Robert Goddard

Some books are terrible.  They really are.  You read their book them and all the while you’re fighting a great urge to google the author, find out their address, drive over there and urge them to throw out their pen in favour of contributing something worthwhile.  Then there are some books that are wonderful, quires of awesome pages that make you happy to be alive.  Most books aren't either of these things.  Most fall under categories of are ‘quite good’, ‘okay’, ‘rather fun but’ and so on.  Occasionally though you find a book where you finish reading it and you’re not sure what to think.  You’re aware that you managed to finish it, so it can’t have been awful (or worse incredibly dull).  You’re also aware that it didn't excite/thrill you or make you laugh much/cry.  It feels wrong to call them ‘average’ or ‘decent’ because you’re not sure if they could have been better or worse than that.  They are, in short, a nightmare to review and usually end up taking up a lot of my time because gathering my thoughts takes rather a long time.  For me, Robert Goddard’s new book The Ways of the World falls right into this category and if you’ll bear with me (and I promise this isn't going to be too rambling) I’ll explain why.

Robert Goddard is a very experienced author having published 24 books including this one, largely focussed on the Crime and Mystery genre.  This book is set in Paris during the Armistice Treaty negotiations after the Great War.  The hero is James ‘Max’ Maxted, a veteran airman whose diplomat father was killed in suspicious circumstances at the house of his mistress.  Although the Paris police write the death off as an accident, Max, against the will of pretty much everyone, seeks to find out the truth.  This predictably ends up getting him into all sorts of trouble with people ranging from Russian Monarchists, German spies and the British diplomatic service.  He finds help along the way, but he is very much the amateur sleuth, cleverly but clumsily eking his way towards the truth while pushing back against the obstacles placed in his path.

The author, as one would expect from someone so experienced, writes well in an engaging style, feeding you information as you go along little by little, allowing you to form your own suspicions in very much the way that the characters do.  His characters, if a little bit caricatured, are interesting with decent development throughout.  The only real criticism that I would throw his way is his constant need to throw in phrases/sentences in French.  Now I, luckily, speak quite good French and had no difficulty parsing these sections and I would imagine that most people would be able to get the gist of most of them, but it would have been nice if he’d been a little more nuanced.  It would not be hard to make the translations easier to work out through the English dialogue that surrounds it.  Other authors do it well and Goddard’s refusal to do so smacks me a little of arrogance.

Other than that I have no real criticisms of this book and so you may be wondering why I’m so conflicted over how to come to an opinion over it.  The problem is that I can’t for the life of me work out whether or not it is any good.  I enjoyed reading it without it really having any significant affect on my heart-rate or on my emotions.  It was well-structured and came to a good ending, but it didn’t really leave me wanting more though nor did it leave me disappointed.  The book isn’t bland per-sé but it lacks punch or zest.  I could of course be being very harsh here.  From other reviews on the wild-world of the internet I see that this book has attracted reasonable praise and has sold quite well, but I wonder how much of this is because of the man and not the book.  I would encourage people to give this book a go, if nothing else because I’d be intrigued to have a conversation with someone who’s not as conflicted as me over it. 

6/10 (I think)