I really enjoyed just listening to the narrator's voice in Snowdrops - it was seriously sexy stuff. I am such a sucker for a British accent.
And there were some very funny lines in it - I will be using "The only free cheese is in a mousetrap" at least once this week!
And I like "Fish like to swim" as an excuse for drinking vodka whilst eating fish.
But perhaps these are old tired lines that I haven't heard before......
This book came in for a bit of trouncing on the Librarything Booker group read. Most readers did not feel any sympathy for the characters and found the female characters particularly ineptly drawn. Shallow. One-dimensional - that sort of thing.
It's not the kind of book I would normally read. And indeed that may be part of the problem. What kind of book is it? I think it has been touted as a mystery or a crime thriller type number. I don't think it really knows what it is.
It opens with the narrator writing a letter to his fiancee - a bit of a "By the way...you probably need to know this about me, before you say "I do" type confessional. I don't think I'll be spoiling anything by letting you know that you never find out if the narrator does get married in the end. That's part of the fun I suppose...imagining the response to the revelations.
The character certainly is an odd-ball. Perhaps a product of what seems to be a rather constipated English middle-class culture. He's a solicitor working for some complicated banking/energy deal with many partners - all of whom sound deeply suspect.
One lonely weekend, at a train station, witnessing an attempted robbery, he forms a perhaps unwise attachment to the almost victims, some young Russian women.
They say they are sisters.
Only they're not.
They are the cheese in the mousetrap.
He is the mouse.
The story's not that bad.
It was certainly more interesting than what I was looking at on the train.
But then the foreign always seems more interesting doesn't it?
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