Too Beautiful for You

Rod Liddle Press Reviews

‘As news of a terrible plane crash echoes through his office, adulterer Martin Dempsey thinks only of defenestrating himself now his "too beautiful" colleague Lucy has humiliatingly dumped him. Several postcodes away, taxi driver Eddie gropes his mother-in-law in her lounge while his unwitting wife is locked in the loo. In a nearby wine bar Emily gets, you know, drunk out of her mind. Later she sleeps with a down-and-out, and, as worse leads to worst, is reacquainted with the fact that she still has an eight-year-old son somewhere whom she "forgot" to abort. This worthless bunch of characters join others in a series of loosely linked stories of modern life that sometimes meander tantalisingly into the surreal, while never coalescing into something that could be called a novel. Rod Liddle, indubitably possessed of powerful writing skills, might be trying to show us how morally degraded our society has become. If so, he certainly succeeds.
Guardian Review