A Long Way Down

著者 : NickHornby

• Penguin (2006年4月6日発売)

感想・レビュー・書評

[smallchiniさんの感想 · 2010年5月25日]

This is the third Hornby book I have read following ‘About a Boy’ and ‘High Fidelity’ and sadly it is the book that reveals his fundamental weakness as a novelist.
He failed in many areas – he chose to employ four protagonists and gave equal weights to them by letting them talk in alternating chapters. Each new chapter is told using the voice of one of them which gives their point of view on what is told in a previous chapter by an another character, seemingly clever but not working in any way. A structure like this should give readers a sense of unexpectedness or help the suspense to develop (I have read such a novel), but it doesn’t, it just remains strangely flat. Four characters are supposedly very different and contrasting, but they are not, because Hornby is careless in their voice and as a result, they all sound like the author despite of their apparent difference in sex, age and the backgrounds.
There are novels which have unlikable or even obnoxious character as a protagonist, but what makes those novels enjoyable to read is that there is truth in them. Martin, Jess, JJ (the weakest of all) and Maureen are all caricatures without the truth.
In ‘About a Boy’ and ‘High Fidelity’, Hornby delivered humour spontaneously, whereas with ‘Long Way Down’, it was a case of self-indulgent heavy-handed humour and where the novel gets to the Angel part, I finally lost my patience and had to put the book down.

[かとうさんの感想 · 2008年8月4日]

ロンドンWaterstones購入
ようやく読み始める
2008/07-

[mina_aさんの感想 · 2007年6月28日]

Don't know what to say. I loved it. My kind of book.