Tag Archives: Christopher Shevlin

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Spy Who Came In From the Bin,’ by Christopher Shevlin

Leave a comment

‘He’s a hard man to photograph,’ said Lance.

‘But these are good likenesses, right?’ said Lizzie.

‘Sort of. It sounds weird to say, but there are other people who look more like Jonathon than he does himself.’

I’ve been trying to come up with blog topics all week, and I forgot I’d finished a book last week that I hadn’t reviewed yet.

There’s a third book in  Christopher Shevilin’s weird Jonathon Fairfax series, The Spy Who Came In From the Bin. Jonathan Fairfax, if you recall my earlier reviews, is a well-meaning Englishman who bumbles through life, never quite sure what’s going on as adventure swirls around him.

In this book, Jonathon wakes up in a garbage truck in Berlin, being unloaded from a bin, having completely forgotten who he is. He’s taken to a hospital, but manages to escape after an assassin shows up to murder him. Soon he’s taken in by a friendly American student and her Russian boyfriend. They go on the run, pursued by CIA killers, as Jonathon’s best friend and girlfriend rush to rescue him, assisted by other CIA killers, who may or may not actually be on their side.

It’s all very weird, in the style of these books, where there are very few actual gags to laugh at, but the situations are highly comic in cumulative effect.

What I disliked about this book was a lazy European anti-Americanism, that sees the US as the world’s only real problem. I’m not sure whether I can overlook that attitude enough to read the next book, assuming there is one.

But it’s funny. I can’t deny that.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Jonathon Fairfax Must Be Destroyed,’ by Christopher Shevlin

Leave a comment

I was a little disappointed with this sequel to Christopher Shevlin’s The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax, which I reviewed favorably a few days back. But I’m not sure I’m being fair.

When last we saw our shy, ineffectual hero, he had survived great dangers and won the girl of his dreams.

At the beginning of Jonathon Fairfax Must Be Destroyed (set five years later), the girl of his dreams is completely out of the picture. He is living with a different girlfriend, and he’s working at a job he hates, as a temp at Fylofax, the most powerful corporation on earth. Jonathon isn’t quite sure what Fylofax does, but then nobody else is, either. In fact, the company’s unprecedented growth is the result of blatant fraud on the part of one of its top managers, an American who is on the verge of taking it over completely. He will do anything to succeed, including cold-blooded murder. By chance he becomes aware of Jonathon’s existence, and grows convinced that he’s a corporate spy. Therefore, Jonathon must be eliminated – from the face of the earth.

Meanwhile, Jonathon experiences unemployment, a breakup with his girlfriend, homelessness, and falling in love with another girl of his dreams. As in the previous book (and I didn’t really make this clear when reviewing it), Jonathon is more a maguffin than a hero, a calm, somewhat stagnant center for the story, and most of the real action revolves around his handsome, elegant friend Lance Ferman, who is Jonathon’s exact opposite, except for the fact that they’re both men of good will.

I had the impression that this book was less funny than its predecessor, but that may just be my prejudice. I took almost personal offense to the author’s writing out Rachel, the love interest in The Perpetual Astonishment… Her disappearance was explained, but I didn’t really buy it, and I think it embittered me. There were a lot of funny moments, and I laughed, but it wasn’t the same (for me). Brief, not too biting, jabs were taken at Christianity and at capitalism (though to be fair that was mostly at Ayn Rand, whom I don’t like either).

So you may want to ignore my jaundiced viewpoint. Jonathon Fairfax Must Be Destroyed is still funnier than most books around. Cautions for language and sexual situations. Also (once again) semi-comic murder.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax,’ by Christopher Shevlin

Leave a comment

The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax

Occasionally you run into a book that doesn’t fit neatly into any of your existing mental categories. Then there’s a temptation to pan it because it’s not the kind of book you think it ought to be.

But that’s unjust. The author should be judged on the basis of what he accomplished, not what you were expecting.

Christopher Shevlin is a pretty Wodehousian writer. And because of that, it’s a little jarring when actual murder enters the stage of his book. In a Wodehouse novel, the worst thing you’ll see is the abstraction of a silver cow creamer, or the purloining of a prize pig, or the alienation of a French cook’s services.

But The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax begins with the murder of a fairly innocent middle-aged woman. And it’s played for laughs.

That kind of threw me for a loop.

But I stayed with it, because it was a very funny, very well written book.

Jonathon Fairfax is an ineffectual young man with deep insecurities, living in London. So he’s none the wiser when he (inadvertently) helps a murderer to find his victim’s address, then makes friends with two fashionable people in a disreputable café, and finally meets “the most deeply and woundingly beautiful girl [he] had ever seen,” all in a single day. He stumbles his way through an improbable courtship while getting unintentionally involved in the exposure of a massive government conspiracy. Continue reading ‘The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax,’ by Christopher Shevlin →