Not winning any kindly competitions...

Finally finished 'The Kindly Ones', which took me rather longer than I had intended. However, the nice thing about bringing up the rear is that I can read back over everyone else's posts and see what they thought. Somewhat surprisingly, you may think (seen as we may generally give the impression that we don't agree on anything at all) I agree more with Will than with Andrew & Elliot about this one.

Perhaps it's because I read it somewhat sporadically, but I found the whole thing a bit, well, bitty. I liked the childhood 'memoir' but I felt that, because it was so long, it threw the whole of the book out of kilter. You have this long, funny and quite touching section which leads on to....something entirely unconnected. And then there are several more unconnected bits before we end with poor, lovely Moreland turning up, looking all dazed and confused, at Molly Jeavons' house. Glad as I was to see him again, I'd had several attacks of 'where-is-this-all-going-itis' before I got there. I had to flick back through the book to try to remember what had happened after I finished it, and now I think that wasn't because I read it in bits here and there (I did that with 'Casanova's Chinese Restaurant' and had no problems remembering that one) but because, whilst there are a number of nice vignettes, they are just that - vignettes - without much to link them.

I do tend to lose interest to a degree when the characters I like aren't around and - given that there aren't very many of those - this may be a bit of a problem. I am encouraged to see that Moreland crops up in later volumes, and I am hoping that Matilda's defection to Donners won't be permanent, although I am quite keen to find out what he gets up to in his cellars. Bit of a Max Mosley moment, perhaps?

I do agree with Elliot, though, when he says that Nick has become more bearable in this volume. You see a bit of self-awareness poking through, which is nice. I almost liked him in the part when he went to collect Uncle Giles' belongings and met up with Duport again. Having said that, the entire absence of Isobel - or even any concern about Isobel - throughout the narrative was, as usual, a bit offensive, speaking as one of those decorative little women things.