I would like to please find the person who in the description of this book promised an "uproarious cocktail of comic zingers" and give them my best "Grandma Lydia look" (*) (*) If you are NOT familiar with the "Grandma Lydia look", which you probably aren't since the chances of you actually having met my grandmother are slim to none, I will explain. This is the look you get from a tiny 5-foot-tall sweetest Eastern European grandmother that makes you stop in your tracks and beg forgiveness for anything you ever did or will ever do. Because she KNOWS you did something wrong, and firmly believes that a stern look alone should suffice to set you on the right path. And you bet your ass it will! I've been working on that look, too - so someday it can be re-christened as "Grandma Nataliya" look. That's my big aspiration in life. I'm not even joking about it. Seriously.But wait a second, you say. Are you trying to tell us that Hugh Laurie, THE Hugh Laurie, THE comic genius is NOT FUNNY in this book? Well, not exactly. This book is funny and smart and all that, but it really straddles the line between that and uncomfortable - because Laurie uses humor and satire and parody extremely well to showcase quite a few things about our world and ourselves that are uncomfortable, unsettling, and in the end, not as much funny as disturbing. His humor in this book is frequently the equivalent of that uncomfortable startled half-giggle that people involuntarily utter to their sheer dismay as they see something rather bad happening. His humor serves as a defense mechanism in this book that should not be funny, but is using humor and parody as a weapon."Because what does it mean, to say that things aren't going well? Compared to what? You can say: compared to how things were going a couple of hours ago, or a couple of years ago. But that's not the point. If two cars are speeding towards a brick wall with no brakes, and one car hits the wall moments before the other, you can't spend those moments saying the second car is much better off than the first. Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference. So unless we're going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes. Us, or anyone else. Because we're not comparing it with anything. And anyway, we're all dead, or never born, and the whole thing really is a dream.There, you see. That's a funny side."Sidespittingly funny this book is not. And it is not meant to be such. The humor is uses is what we came to associate with 'quintessential Britishness' - dry and deadpan and almost serious. Which is fitting for a book that after a first chapter indeed filled with the promised "zingers" quickly heads down the path of exposing monetary greed and terrorism and secret wars waged for little else but money, and the overarching conspiracies that in the light of many events of our messed-up modern world hit quite close to home. "The only good thing I've ever noticed about money, the only positive aspect of an otherwise pretty vulgar commodity, is that you can use it to buy things."Oh, by the way, it was written in 1996, but feels as true as it can be a decade and a half later. Because things have probably only got worse. And all we can do is laugh helplessly about them."It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland - where we plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little."Now, I'm not all that familiar with the spy/thriller/Bond-esque or whatever you call it genre. But even I can easily spot the parodies of those on every page. Thomas Lang, our protagonist, whom I could not imagine as anyone else but Mr. Laurie himself (How could I not??? You tell me while looking at that picture!!!!) is essentially a good guy with a military past and manners a la Mr. Bond a bit. He gets offered quite a handsome sum of money for the life of a certain American businessman (who, by the way, comes equipped with a lovely daughter with beautiful teeth), honorably refuses it, and the next thing he knows, ends up swept up in the quite substantial international conspiracy, with a first-hand participation in a few terrorist acts to boot. With quite depressing things seen through every humor-laden passage. Where simple stupid greed is what runs everything, really. And that's depressing, yeah.I liked it quite a bit, even though there were a few parts in the middle where I was tempted to put this book down and forget about it. I'm just not that into the genre that Laurie parodies here, after all, and sometimes immersing myself into this story was not that easy. But ultimately every time something in the way Hugh Laurie writes ended pulling me back into the story. And he rewarded me with the "Fuck this all, this shit is depressing and nothing is ever likely to change" feeling in the end, which I assume could have been the underlying message of this story. The way the world and humanity are irrevocably fucked up. Not the comedic zingers. So don't read this for funny. Read this for the serious, please. 3.5 stars - and I plan to read all the future literature works by Mr. Laurie if this gentleman desires to create more. And I will leave you with this apt (and actually funny!) observation of Mr. Laurie's protagonist on the bird strike of the aircraft: "This, rather unfairly in my view, made it sound as if it was the bird’s fault; as if the little feathered chap had deliberately tried to head-butt twenty tons of metal travelling in the opposite direction at just under the speed of sound, out of spite."
This book is F-A-N-T-A-S-T-I-C !!!Maybe you haven't recognized the name of the author, but this Hugh Laurie is THE Hugh Laurie who was the star on the TV series House, M.D..Sure, maybe some of you would say "So what? He is an actor but can he write?" Oh, yes! He CAN write! Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.If you ever watched some episode of House, M.D. you can be familiarized with the personality of the character that Laurie portraited there, and you will find the main character here very much like. The only good thing I've ever noticed about money, the only positive aspect of an otherwise pretty vulgar commodity, is that you can use it to buy things.Maybe he is not so grumpy but he is in the very same level of cynicism with direct politically incorrect comments. It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland - where we plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little.He is an honest voice in the book, where you can't separate the view of the main character and the position of the author, and anyway that's not important since you will laugh a lot, BUT you will think a lot too. Having a vote once every four years is not the same thing as democracy.I laughed a lot, I pondered a lot and I had the time of my life reading this novel and due that, I am even including it in my "favorites" virtual shelf that I commented in other reviews, I am struggling to keep it to 10 books tops at any moment, maybe some title would go out or go in, but always only 10 books there. This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.Maybe when I said that I laughed a lot, you'd diminish the novel, saying "Oh, no! That must be a dumb book then!" But no, it isn't.The humor here is not silly comedy but in fact it's smart and witty comments.Laurie is totally politically incorrect in this book and gosh I thank him for being in that way.He is an author with attitude and you will find that even the "offensive" comments are not made in a deliberated act for the sick purpose to offense somebody, no, if you really can get into the mood of the book, you will find that Laurie is just telling the story of some guy who talks in an infinite honest way. Just because it's a bad job doesn't mean I need to do it badly.The novel has a lot of combined genres, since you will find a detective novel merging into a espionage story, with a lot of military and politics stuff.Each character, main or minor, has a purpose and one of the best things is that at some moments you will meet a really main character without realizing it, until the story would develop more, it will be when you would know it.In my opinion, this book is the ones that when one is reading it, one thinks "Geez! For books like this one is that I love to read books!"If you analyze the very title of the book, you will realize that the story isn't about terrorism, since I'd understand people finding without taste to read a humoristic story about terrorism, but this isn't the case, this novel is about selling guns, about the arms dealing business, and that's a totally different field, you will understand when you'd read the novel.Give it a chance to the book. You won't regret it.
Do You like book The Gun Seller (1998)?
The Gun Seller, by Hugh Laurie $8.25 ***** Yeah. The author is that Hugh Laurie.If you've been reading these reviews of mine, you know I'm pretty tight with a buck when it comes to Kindle books. I love to troll through kinlib.com looking for promising freebies and I rarely buy a Kindle book priced higher than $4.99. And this book is priced pretty steepishly at $8.25. Yikes, right?HOWEVER . . . if you download the free sample, as I did, and read it, as I did, I'll bet you end up parting with that $8.25, as I did.What a terrific book. A lot of the reviewers on Amazon called it a thriller spoof. Beg to differ. It's a thriller for real, but the narrator-protagonist is very funny and very clever. The narrative voice is GREAT.And as to the plot, well . . . when the plot took a pretty big leap about a third of the way in, I started to worry it was going to run away with itself. But no problem. Believability was sustained all the way through and Laurie kept the twists coming all the way to the end.I hope (maybe on the next "House" hiatus?) Laurie will resurrect his narrator/protagonist and treat us to another fine adventure.
—L.T. Fawkes
Perhaps it's unfair to review this book seeing as I haven't finished reading it yet, but I'll do it anyway! I think, perhaps, I picked up this book for the wrong reason. I wasn't particularly interested in the story, though it did intrigue me. In all honesty, I picked it up because Hugh Laurie wrote it and I love him. (More specifically, I love Robert Sean Leonard who stars with Hugh Laurie on 'House', but has not actually written a book so this was the best I could do...) This, I have discovered, is the wrong reason to read a book. Laurie's writing style is...odd. Not like the quaint, lovably English kind of odd. It's just odd-odd. I'm not loving it, but I'm not hating it. Perhaps I can be more specific at a later date, but right now, I'm not exactly anxious to finish it.**Update: I abandoned this book. It just held no appeal for me. Perhaps it's my scatterbrained disposition at the moment, but I just had a hard time following the story and in the end, I just didn't care. I do, however, still love Robert Sean Leonard and, by association, Hugh Laurie. :)
—Samantha
The only reason I read this book? You guessed it, Hugh Laurie. Anything to which his name is attached is worth a looksee. I'm not typically a fan of spy novels, so I must admit that some of the spoofing was probably lost on me. However, Laurie obviously enjoys the English language and bends and twists it to wit-laced results. As a narrator, Thomas Lang is sarcastic and self-deprecating, but also a genuinely nice guy. He's likable, someone you'd like to go have a drink with just to hear his running commentary on the people and places with which he comes into contact. Some of my favorites included his observation that hiding behind the warehouse walls was not a good idea "since the walls were no more than an inch of Gyproc plaster board, and probably couldn't have stopped a cherry-stone squeezed from the fingers of a tired three-year-old." Also, his philosophical thoughts on the use of the term bird strike: "This, rather unfairly in my view, made it sound as if it was the bird's fault; as if the little feathered chap had deliberately tried to head-butt twenty tons of metal travelling in the opposite direction at just under the speed of sound, out of spite." Amusing and sometimes laugh out loud funny, it's worth the read and will probably most appreciated by people familiar with the spy genre.
—Amanda
