I didn't actually finish this book. I read most of it, and it was OK, and I had about 50 pages to go. I wasn't inspired by it, so I figured I'd knock those off that evening and start something else. Sadly, at the end of a long train journey that evening, the 13th September 2009, I set it down on the concrete outside Andover train station and must have forgotten to pick it up when my lift arrived.That was a little disappointing, but not very, which is really as good a verdict on the book as I can give. It didn't impress me but it was just fine. Thomson is a decent writer and his style fits nicely into the late 90s. Soft is hugely anachronistic, in fact, but not in a good way. Its big premise, that a group of people could be subconsciously programmed to become living adverts for a new soft drink product, has basically no shock value whatsoever ten years later. We're au fait with the notion of subliminal messages. Many of us realise advertising is increasingly using psychological theory. Soft shows a little foresight, predating viral marketing, but it's not surprising stuff.I like Thomson's feel for London, for the grotty towns of the south, the everyday Britain he presents, and I think he was wise to delay playing his cards out - the book only contains one Big Idea, really. It's decently written, the characters are fine, but I just never saw why I should care.There were a few tangential things Thomson made a big deal of that didn't really seem important. Maybe they became so, although I can't see why. I don't know why the girl had to have a bizarre relationship with an uber-rich american, or why her father was in a caravan in the grim north. I don't know what all the crime-in-St-Louis was about. I don't know why Barker's love interests matter. The problem is that Thomson's characters are fairly 3-dimensional, they do many things, but he placed them in such a constricted 2-d world, where these things seem meaningless, almost esoteric.In short, if someone reads this and tells me that the last 50 pages of Soft are an unequivocal work of genius, I'll track down another copy. But I think I have to take it as a failure if I can read more than 200 pages of a story and not care too much what happens in the last 50.And if by chance you found my copy, that's cool. It has a nice cover. I got it in a second-hand bookshop in Penzance, I think, and someone had written inside the front cover, in pencil.
I do love a good noir, and the Goodreads algorithm recommended this one. Bad decision.The premise was daft, the dame flaky and I was bored to tears by 'filler' prose:"Barker began to sing “Hotel California”under his breath. He had no idea why that particular song had come to mind—unless perhaps he’d heard it on the radio that morning while he was waiting for his saucepan of water to boil. On a dark desert highway Cool wind in your hair …He had to hum the rest because he couldn’t remember the words."QED.
Do You like book Soft (2002)?
Enjoyable enough but I doubt I'd recommend it or read it again, especially due to what I considered a disappointing ending.
—Chris
I don't think this is a bad book. Thomson can definitely write, and he's on fairly decent form here. He manages to switch between three pretty different narrators and make each voice convincing, each character fleshed out. When he's telling the story as Barker, the former bouncer and hardman who moves to London to escape his past, he's not far short of brilliant. However, the character's pasts and complexities in the end aren't really all that relevant to the plot, and although it's good for fiction to have believable and interesting characters, all that interesting flesh turns out to be pretty much incidental, and I'm not a big fan of padding. I've got other books to read.Plus, while narrating as Glade Thomson for me is too waffly, earnest and flowery, too typically self-regarding-coffee-house-writer in his style. And the way the plot is introduced into all this padding is too clumsy, and the way it's wrapped up at the end too anti-climactic. And Soft never really has all that much to say about the advertising industry and consumerist society anyway. Basically it's all a bit of a let down.Thomson IS very good, but this isn't. Go read The Insult instead.
—Ugh
I would give it four stars in fact, but I did not like the chapter five that is far too long, and its blurry, dreamlike style seemed to me to be out of sync with the rest of the book. Which is a pity, because otherwise it's a real joy to read it: well, that is, if you are not too squeamish and if you do not happen to be a hardcore fan of orange-coloured soft drinks...The characters are finely cut, and it's good that Glade is just a normal girl and not an utter angel. The only character I had some difficulty with was Lambert - have they not heard of task division in the underworld, and must those poor gangsters really deal with everything, from the high end of links with the research community to the one working with flame torches, broken kneecaps and worse?
—Alena
