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. There is something about Giles Wareing that makes even his descriptions of fixing the dishwasher hilarious and the excerpts from his slapdash journalism are perfectly pitched: just bad enough, and, also, just good enough.
Dowling keeps up a strong narrative thread in The Giles Wareing Haters’ Club (Picador, £14.99) and never for a moment loses sight of his primary purpose and talent: to be amusing. This is a wonderful book.
Marie Phillips, too, is very funny. In Gods Behaving Badly (Cape, £12.99) she has moved the Olympian gods to north London, where they squabble among themselves and try to hold down modern jobs; Apollo is a TV psychic; Artemis (hunting, and chastity, and the moon) walks dogs; Dionysus runs a night club; Aphrodite’s phone sex is out of this world; Athene has been reduced to a verbose bluestocking whose wisdom the rest of the gods find too boring to listen to; Eros is trying to become a good Christian but finds it hard with a mother like Aphrodite.
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