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The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (view source)
Revision as of 12:52, 2 August 2012
, 12:52, 2 August 2012no edit summary
|summary=Extremely clever, innovative and often very funny, genre bending historical novel that incorporates aspects of science fiction. When it's good it's positively brilliant but can also be challenging to keep pace with.
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It's hard to know where to start in reviewing Ned Beauman's Booker long-listed ''The Teleportation Accident''. Reading it, you feel like the parent of an ADHD-suffering child. At times it is lovable, brilliant and entertaining, at others you just want to reach for the Ritalin and tell it to sit in a corner quietly while it composes itself. A clue to both the brilliance and frustration of Beauman is in the vast range of writers to whom he has been compared in both this and his first novel [[Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman|Boxer, Beetle]]. There are hints of people as wide ranging as [[:Category:David Mitchell|David Mitchell]], [[:Category:P G WoodhouseWodehouse|P G WoodhouseWodehouse]], [[:Category:Douglas Adams|Douglas Adams]], [[:Category:Raymond Chandler|Raymond Chandler]] even [[:Category:Angela Carter|Angela Carter]] to name just a few. Beauman takes a huge range of styles and genres and pushes them and bends them often to glorious effect, but it can be a challenge keeping up with him at times.
The result is a historical novel where the characters are largely uninformed by the times in which they live, a romance driven by lust and unrequited feelings, a science fiction novel that is based in the past and a detective story without a detective. Beauman references many literary writers, from ancient Greeks, Hemmingway, Joyce, and Heidegger though to the sci-fi genre of HP Lovencraft and various playwrights, but the style is more Philip Marlowe than Christopher Marlowe.