Giles Wareing, a freelance journalist, is days away from his 40th birthday, pretty sure he has gout and otherwise minding — well, monitoring is perhaps more accurate — his own business, typing ‘Giles Wareing funny/brilliant/clever’ into search engines. When a perverse impulse leads him to try some less flattering adjectives he discovers the Haters: ‘A lifetime of inchoate paranoia gelled.’ On a specially dedicated chat site every article he writes is held up to scorn and ridicule and, worse still, psychological analysis. This is enough to accelerate anyone’s midlife crisis, and Wareing’s progresses with delightful precipitation. As his paranoia worsens, so do his friends, and although it occurs to him that he is too old to be getting into the wrong crowd, he is soon surrounded by some appalling characters.
Tim Dowling has the touch of Kingsley Amis in reproducing boring conversations with awful accuracy, and the more his hero offends those around him, the more one likes him.
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