A (boring) Week in December

A great big disappointing "meh". I came to Sebastian Faulks only relatively recently, but quite enjoyed the two books of his that I've read (here and here). And this one, A Week in December, sounded good and got off to a pretty promising start. Basically, one of those state-of-the-nation novels, with a diverse cast of characters, that tries to span the whole of society while saying something zeitgeisty. That's my reading of what I think Faulks was up to at any rate. Where I think he went off the rails was to cram together stories and characters that are a little too diverse, with the result that the novel is less than the sum of its parts. Individually the stories are interesting, and actually are quite zeitgeisty (drugs, terrorists, bankers), but they're simply too disparate, and the attempts to tie them together just fell flat for me. And it certainly doesn't help that the characters are generally unsympathetic and occasionally annoying.

Overall, a thumbs-down from me.