May Contain Traces of Magic by Tom Holt

27 Sep 2009

May Contain Traces of Magic

Tom Holt

Orbit, Hardback, 352 pp., ISBN: 978-1-8149-505-7, Price: £12.99

I.E.Sawmill

Following the troubled life of salesman Chris Popham as he is forced to straddle dimensions and realities, May Contain Traces of Magic is the newest in a long line of humorous quasi-mythopoeic novels by Tom Holt. Chris must attempt to shift a shipment of magical Multi-Function Megacurses to uninterested punters, battle demons who are hell-bent on ruining his life and – hardest of all – save his flailing love life against all the odds.

May Contain Traces of Magic will please Holt’s many longstanding fans but not necessarily swell their numbers. It certainly offers some great escapism and is plotted in a way that makes it genuinely page-turning; I would recommend this to a thirteen year old boy who is too scared of the Discworld cover art or the length of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to attempt either. As fans of the genre will recognise and enjoy, Holt’s writing is Jasper Fforde-esque in the puncturing of reality with characters who could only exist in fantasy. There is also a similarity in the way in which the author’s voice and brand of humour resonates through all of the characters: every one is as smart as any other, all as cynical, all as gently, affably, damaged.

A problem with Holt’s style of humour is that it appears at times entirely formulaic. It frequently relies upon the use of extended metaphors and similes; if used once or twice such a device can be startling and genuinely funny, with the subject described becoming embroiled in a ridiculous hyperbolic blast of surrealism: ‘I even loved you when you got that terrible acne and your face looked like the Bible and Shakespeare in Braille’ is a case in point. Holt, however, uses this set-up so often and so clumsily it soon loses any clout. The similes baffle more often than they startle: rather than finding it in any way evocative, the reader must pause to question whether Holt had put either far too little or too much time into designing the metaphor. It is writing that draws too much attention to itself. There is also the problem of including extended metaphors in a book that has a supra-realistic setting: the reader is already fully-primed to suspend their disbelief in a world of imps and goblins so there is no thrill at all in the defamiliarisation afforded by the metaphors. At one point, a character is described as trying to speak but the words are ‘frozen on his lips, like mammoths in Siberian ice’; elsewhere a ‘thought dropped into his mind like the apple clonking down on Newton’s head’; in a moment of high-drama a character becomes as ‘wide-awake as a coffee-taster’s convention.’ When a book relies upon being relentlessly whacky-kerazee (a throwaway line of dialogue at the beginning runs: ‘[It was] invented by Professor Cornelius Van Spee of Leiden,’…‘Wasn’t he the one who went mad and tired to blow up the planet?’), it becomes a little tiresome.

That said, and fighting fire with fire, Holt’s jokes come as thick and fast as a concussed Olympic bobsleigh team down a greased drainpipe. This is a book with flimsy characters, a contrived plot-line and absolutely no opportunity for any emotional investment in either so if you treat it as a Bumper Book of Quips and Irreverent Asides rather than a novel it is a delight. It would work well as an audio-tape: it’s easy to put down and then pick up again for a burst of light comedy. Viable plot-continuity is often eschewed for the sake of gags or just out of pure laziness: for instance, one character has a Darth Vader mug but later in the book confesses to knowing nothing about Star Wars. The novel appears to suffer from an overall lack of editing that might streamline such details. The memorable verb ‘dopplered’, for example, is used twice a few pages apart. Eventually, too, all the characters become so alike that they are virtually indistinguishable. One aspect of this is that they all become weirdly gendered as bluff, brash men: a female character smiles, inexplicably, ‘the grin of a hungry man thinking about food’. One only really assumes Chris is the hero because he is given more lines than the others. He is not particularly likeable. He’s actually a little creepy and a bit thick: when he describes a wisecrack as being a Chandlerian the reader is not entirely sure whether he means the writer or the character in Friends.

Tellingly the back of the book emphasises the popularity of Holt and not the quality of his writing. It is fun, accessible, mindless entertainment, an episode of Charmed made acceptable for thirty-something males by its references to Top Gear. Sub-Douglas Adams (indeed, ‘The Book of All Human Knowledge’ featured in May Contain Traces Of Magic is a direct rip-off of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and a poor cousin to Terry Pratchett in theme and tone, Holt’s jokes about SatNav systems and James Blunt albums already seem a little dated and affirm how short the shelf-life of Holt’s books is intended to be. If Richard Hammond was locked in a room with Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, May Contain Traces Of Magic might be the result.