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2.0 out of 5 stars
Bog Standard and Beastly, Jun 21 2004
By A Customer
In many ways I admire Sean Wright for putting his pennies where his pen is and having the guerilla marketing knowhow to get his books out there. The problem however is that if they are picked up by a mainstream publisher, I don't see how they could be published without being so heavily edited and revised that they would effectively be ghost-written. Mr Wright is not incapable of writing - I had the privilege of reading an unpublished work by him, set in a spooky school, which had some memorable lines including "an abacus of sweat" on someone's forehead - but it seems to me that the Jesse Jameson books are the worst of him.I was prepared to consider Golden Glow an apprentice work and excuse its weaknesses. Unfortunately Bogie Beast turns out to be no progression at all. It's true that there are fewer spelling mistakes than in Golden Glow, but that in itself does not qualify for literary approbation. The book opens with Jesse returning home with her mother Cathal. The Scratchits - Jesse's wicked step-family - have mysteriously (or conveniently) disappeared, and the house is being looked after by the comic figures of Maud and Claude. They soon leave Cathal and Jesse to it, and so they progress back to the nearest fairy ring to enter the other world and see Jesse's real father - the Bogie Beast - and/or find Jesse's earth father and/or rescue Jesse's friend Jake Briggs (not for the first time, the motivation of the characters is a bit foggy). And the rest of the book is a series of the same sort of encounters, explications and scrapes that made Golden Glow so disappointing. It's not that Mr Wright doesn't have ideas - some of which aren't even that bad - but he has no knowledge that less is more, or that some structure would make a coherent whole out of these random particles of story. For instance, early on we meet Kildrith, a warlock (pictured in the illustrations as a sort of humanoid lizard creature in a Homburg hat - it's a woeful image, a little death of the imagination, that just doesn't work, but nobody close to Mr Wright seems to have cared to tell him) who chases Jesse and Cathal on and off for thirty pages, then disappears and is not mentioned again until he reappears near the end of the book. He speaks in the same voice as all the villains - a bland blend of threatening portentousness and vaguely camp sarcasm. When he turns in one scene from threatening to kill the Jamesons, to offering them a game of hide-and-seek (!), it is simply an excuse for another 'hair's breadth' escape within half a page of the danger arising. There's another one a few pages later, when BeastBots that come to attack Jesse and Cathal start fighting among one another, allowing them to escape (this was also used in Golden Glow). Over and over again comes the pointless, activity-for-its-own-sake, pattern of scrape-and-escape, through the sudden appearance of another character, or some previously unspecified bit of Iggywigg magic. It's repetitive and tiresome. Reviewers below have praised the "pace" of the books, but this is activity as a substitute for achievement, an inability to sustain a scene. You might think that the Bogie Beast would feature prominently - but you would be wrong. He appears briefly in a dream of Jesse's - looking, from the illustration, less like a dreaded father-monster than a reveller at Woodstock, and then appears again at the end, though he doesn't actually threaten Jesse and her cohorts, preferring to - I'm afraid - enable another 'lucky' escape by getting into a fight with one of the witches who are also after them. I could go on - though not, perhaps, for 26 volumes. But a few further examples of the innumerable flaws that fill Bogie Beast will suffice. At one point, for no apparent reason, Jesse falls into a stupor. In the subsequent pages, we are given no fewer than four possible reasons for this: "The Negotiator" had "somehow drained her energy" (p111) and then suddenly "her strength and energy ... who or what was draining them?" (p111 again!), and later it becomes "the Bogie Beast's music ... trying to control her" (p125) and suddenly she "realise[s] in a dreamy kind of way that it was the towers that had sent her into a stupor". Which is it? Make your mind up Mr Wright! Midway through the book Jesse is warned that someone close to her will betray her. Who, she wonders, at some length? Answer - nobody - it never comes up again. Similarly when she is in the stupor caused by - whatever it was - her friends use a spell on her to rouse her, which Iggywigg warns will destroy some of her memories. Again - never mentioned thereafter. It really does seem that all Mr Wright wants to do is fill 160 pages so that he can chalk another 'classic' up. If he paid more attention to the writing and substituted quality for quantity then we would all benefit. I hope he takes these comments in the spirit in which they are intended, as constructive criticism. For at the moment in the first two Jesse Jameson books there is no coherence, no structure, no real plot, no characterisation - Cathal is initially knowledgeable and motherly, then bizarrely slangy (telling Jesse that her hamster is probably dead as they live for "two to three years max"), then suddenly falls for a trap that Jesse sees through, and finally irresponsibly tells her daughter she's off home and Jesse can stay in fairy land if she likes... - no colour or sense of scene or time or anything like that at all. There is time yet to improve the books, with a promised 23 more volumes to come! But will anyone want to continue reading them, after another poor performance like this?
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