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Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Many smiles of recognition I found this in a remaindered bookshop a few weeks ago and picked it up immediately, thinking of the amazing parodies that Faulks used to produce (seemingly with little or no preparation) on Radio 4's "The Write Stuff". This is a handy collection of the best of them, along with a few that have been specially written for this compilation. As others have pointed out, there's some degree of unevenness here, though it'd be churlish to ask for everything to be up at the standard of Dan Brown at the cashpoint,... more info
Not quite as funny as you think it's going to be It's strange to think of the author of Birdsong turning his hand to this sort of thing. It's a very short book of literary parodies and indeed it's difficult not to smile at Dan Brown at the cashpoint, Martin Amis's first day at Hogwarts or Kipling's 'If...' rewritten for today's journalists. The trouble is that smiling is all you do - it's not really 'laugh out loud' funny. There has been a certain amount of precedent for this kind of spoof, from Craig Brown's regular 'Diary' column in Private Eye to... more info
Clever, clever, sometimes too clever! There is no doubt that Faulks is brilliant. This little collection of pastiche/piss-takes (hence the title) proves that more than ever. he takes average occurences and uses famous narrative styles/voices to match these. Ian Fleming doing James Bond in a supermarket is priceless... but the prize goes to his version of Dan Brown going to cahspoint. Hilarious and says in a more concise, witty and accurate way what thousands of newspaper critics have been trying to say about Brown for years.
