Animal Lover - Raymond Friel

My reading choices in the last few weeks may seem a little eclectic, they certainly have seemed that way to me!  The reason for this mix of different book styles is that I am currently doing a lot of internships at various different publishing houses and a large part of most of these is reading.  A LOT of reading!  Some of what I have read has been good, some not so but that I suppose is the nature of the beast. 

The latest book that has crossed my path was a very unusual offering by a first-time author called Raymond Friel whose debut novel Animal Lover has recently been published by Luath Press.  This curious book was given to me on my first day at Luath to proof-read and I was informed by the boss that it was one of her favourites from this year.  Eager to impress her with my knowledge and to misguide her with spurious statements about by skill in the task set before me, I set about proofing this manuscript.  Animal Lover is a story about a lovable animal rights activist named Danny.  Danny’s life is a bit of a mess, but he does have his little gang of freedom fighters who seek to liberate animals from man’s oppression.  Sadly, an operation to free some dogs from a laboratory goes badly wrong and for complex reasons, the dogs have to be thrown off the roof.  This rather tears apart his group, especially a girl that has recently caught his eye who goes off to join some more hardcore, more terroristy groups.  Things don't really go much right for Danny from there-on-in

The book is written in a narrative style with a very unusual method of writing direct speech which, once you get your head around it, is perfectly understandable but I wish he wouldn’t do it - it seems rather pretentious and unnecessary to me to mess with grammatical rules for no real purpose.  The style is very informal and quite irreverent which fits the narrative well and allows for the absurdities of the plot to come through.  These absurdities make this novel a real hoot to read – I provided some great amusement for many of my colleagues as I occasionally burst out laughing at random points – and it is clear that Friel has a real aptitude for this kind of writing.  The characters are engaging and occasionally surprise you with little gems of conversation that bring the story alive and the book is short enough that the whole thing rollicks nicely.

Having said that, however, the length is this novel’s most significant problem (other than the stupid method of writing direct speech). Well, more specifically, it’s the ending that bothers me. The story builds up to a rather terrific climax, but it all ends rather too quickly. It’s not that there’s no closure, no pay-off as such for completing the book. It’s just that, considering the book has been building up to this big ending at ‘The Circus’, you’d have expected this to last more than just a few pages. It’s all rather frustrating really because it almost spoils the book. I have always said that the mark of a good writer is being able to get the reader/viewer to the end of the story and for them to care for the characters; the mark of a great writer is being able to bring together all the strands of the story and bring them to a pleasing conclusion.  Friel so so nearly does that, but he bottles it with an ending that had promise, but was just not nearly long enough. It’s almost like it was an exam essay and he found that, after spending his first hour and a half writing the first half of the book, he only had 30 minutes to write the rest.

Having said all of that, there is no doubt that this is a very fun read, something that I would recommend to anyone wanting to read something quite different and that will make them laugh.  There is definitely something Douglas Adams-y about Friel and that, in my book, is high praise indeed.

7/10