Zak Ferguson 🔖 After an hour or two of consideration after having completed reading Frankie's "debut novel" - I have come to the realisation, one can't quite review this book. 


It is mad. Ridiculous. Cynical. Emotional. Hilarious. Dark. Sharp. But also weak on a storytelling level. Though is that the reason this book exists? Is Boyle wishing to sacrifice vision and original for banal crime fiction? Nope.

I often wonder, why don't more stand-ups write novels? Well, because half of them do not write half of their own stuff anymore, not without a committee beside them. And we are cynical with any house branded celeb that takes a stab at writing a book, unless it’s some wanky autobiography.

Frankie enjoys characters, he loves also being descriptive, but he hates following a path, one he sets up for himself. You can almost hear that laugh of his as he tells another Frankie to fuck off, after having suggested he go this way, and he naturally declines, and instead vaults over a hedge to end up in the gutter covered in pish and shite.

This book could easily be rated a solid five stars for pure stupidity, inlaid with a perfunctory meta-pretentiousness that works on a rare working-class level of acceptability; it also can be, by a lesser being, be trashed and mocked and totally misunderstood.

If I read a two-star review, I'd understand why, but it is, at the end of the day all about taste. If you like Sean Penn as an author, read Boyle. If you like Dawn French as an author, tear off your eyelids and cook them up and call it a delicacy you cunt. Boyle has a very unique style as a comedian and now as a writer. He is his personality. His outlook and poise and manner. It is what it is. Also, he is a comedian that has luckily survived the current soft as fuck monoculture we arere living in at the moment.

This is totally a Boyle work. It is 110% him: irreverence mixed with gross out humour and solid political annihilation stands tall and confrontational. It is perfection on a papyrus plate. Papyrus doesn’t exist anymore, Zak. Oh, who cares? Frankie Boyle's grit and bravery to state the obvious in a sucker punch to the gonads and psyche is why this book soars. It is bold, brash, but also quite intimate in its bawdier sections.

Yes, the read can be very, very, muddled, confused, scattershot. For me, for all of its merits there are downsides but, overall, it's sublime. I can't merely rate it by stars though. It seems to defeat the object of how a book can evolve and change with you. Even though the focus of the "plot" veers off track and smashes into another oncoming car, also somehow driven by Frankie Boyle, cackling, it as a novel sets this up. You're not misled at all in its mania and dislocation; in how the narrator is beyond, not just unreliable, but totally unfocused and carefree, enough so to be unable to follow through on a high, let alone a fucking investigation that the lead kicks up over his mate’s death.

It is brilliant read because it is funny, acerbic, full frontal in its audaciousness and often unputdownable style. There is a middling side. The ending felt like a missed opportunity. I can't voice it yet, but it was dismissive. And maybe that is the point of the whole book, the futility of everything and what a waste of life to get worked up over certain things.

I adore Frankie Boyle's work as a comedian, but for years I've not really followed him. My bad. Sorry Frankie. You shouldn't have held me captive so long in your loft. He repeats quite a lot of his jokes in the media and stand-up tours, close together to when it was initially aired or put out there, and it gives off an impression that he might sometimes be stuck on a loop, reusing his best jokes, on an audience who have heard it all before. And a few stand out here that I've already heard, or heard thereafter, rewatching videos on YouTube, to re-establish my adoration of this guy’s gumption, humour and audacity. Aside from that, that's how jokes work I guess, but it feels a little bit like, oh fuck, I need to cobble some jokes together, what are my newer and "fresher" ones.

You're not reading this for plot. Nah. It is for the madness and world as viewed by Frankie Boyle. Not for its "plot". Not for its skill at telling a pacy compelling neo crime noir thriller. It is all for the style, the perspective of such a bolshy comedian and modern voice.

Frankie Boyle, 2022, Meantime. Baskerville. ISBN-13: 978-1399801157

🕮 Zak Ferguson is a co-founder of Sweat Drenched Press and the author of books like Soft Tissues, Dimension Whores and One Of These Days

Meantime

Zak Ferguson 🔖 After an hour or two of consideration after having completed reading Frankie's "debut novel" - I have come to the realisation, one can't quite review this book. 


It is mad. Ridiculous. Cynical. Emotional. Hilarious. Dark. Sharp. But also weak on a storytelling level. Though is that the reason this book exists? Is Boyle wishing to sacrifice vision and original for banal crime fiction? Nope.

I often wonder, why don't more stand-ups write novels? Well, because half of them do not write half of their own stuff anymore, not without a committee beside them. And we are cynical with any house branded celeb that takes a stab at writing a book, unless it’s some wanky autobiography.

Frankie enjoys characters, he loves also being descriptive, but he hates following a path, one he sets up for himself. You can almost hear that laugh of his as he tells another Frankie to fuck off, after having suggested he go this way, and he naturally declines, and instead vaults over a hedge to end up in the gutter covered in pish and shite.

This book could easily be rated a solid five stars for pure stupidity, inlaid with a perfunctory meta-pretentiousness that works on a rare working-class level of acceptability; it also can be, by a lesser being, be trashed and mocked and totally misunderstood.

If I read a two-star review, I'd understand why, but it is, at the end of the day all about taste. If you like Sean Penn as an author, read Boyle. If you like Dawn French as an author, tear off your eyelids and cook them up and call it a delicacy you cunt. Boyle has a very unique style as a comedian and now as a writer. He is his personality. His outlook and poise and manner. It is what it is. Also, he is a comedian that has luckily survived the current soft as fuck monoculture we arere living in at the moment.

This is totally a Boyle work. It is 110% him: irreverence mixed with gross out humour and solid political annihilation stands tall and confrontational. It is perfection on a papyrus plate. Papyrus doesn’t exist anymore, Zak. Oh, who cares? Frankie Boyle's grit and bravery to state the obvious in a sucker punch to the gonads and psyche is why this book soars. It is bold, brash, but also quite intimate in its bawdier sections.

Yes, the read can be very, very, muddled, confused, scattershot. For me, for all of its merits there are downsides but, overall, it's sublime. I can't merely rate it by stars though. It seems to defeat the object of how a book can evolve and change with you. Even though the focus of the "plot" veers off track and smashes into another oncoming car, also somehow driven by Frankie Boyle, cackling, it as a novel sets this up. You're not misled at all in its mania and dislocation; in how the narrator is beyond, not just unreliable, but totally unfocused and carefree, enough so to be unable to follow through on a high, let alone a fucking investigation that the lead kicks up over his mate’s death.

It is brilliant read because it is funny, acerbic, full frontal in its audaciousness and often unputdownable style. There is a middling side. The ending felt like a missed opportunity. I can't voice it yet, but it was dismissive. And maybe that is the point of the whole book, the futility of everything and what a waste of life to get worked up over certain things.

I adore Frankie Boyle's work as a comedian, but for years I've not really followed him. My bad. Sorry Frankie. You shouldn't have held me captive so long in your loft. He repeats quite a lot of his jokes in the media and stand-up tours, close together to when it was initially aired or put out there, and it gives off an impression that he might sometimes be stuck on a loop, reusing his best jokes, on an audience who have heard it all before. And a few stand out here that I've already heard, or heard thereafter, rewatching videos on YouTube, to re-establish my adoration of this guy’s gumption, humour and audacity. Aside from that, that's how jokes work I guess, but it feels a little bit like, oh fuck, I need to cobble some jokes together, what are my newer and "fresher" ones.

You're not reading this for plot. Nah. It is for the madness and world as viewed by Frankie Boyle. Not for its "plot". Not for its skill at telling a pacy compelling neo crime noir thriller. It is all for the style, the perspective of such a bolshy comedian and modern voice.

Frankie Boyle, 2022, Meantime. Baskerville. ISBN-13: 978-1399801157

🕮 Zak Ferguson is a co-founder of Sweat Drenched Press and the author of books like Soft Tissues, Dimension Whores and One Of These Days

1 comment:

  1. All stand up comedians go over old material at some point, Boyle is no exception. Though to be fair, Jimmy Carr wouldn't exist without Boyle as he frequently wrote a lot of Carr's stuff for payment, which isn't unusual among comics (though not the norm).
    He always comes across to me as a man bitten by the drink who comes sober, who is so angry with himself he takes it out on the world in spite. It's IS funny, but invariably it will decline as rampant depression sets in.

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