As Good As It Gets

by Simon Nolan

Steve, Ward, Kelvin and Marina share an apartment in Brighton, they are all flat broke and in no hurry to make any decisions about their lives. One day Ben, a seedy friend of Steve, shows up and asks to be able to hang out for a while, he hides his bag and goes out to make a call. That's the last they see of him. Next morning they open the bag, inside are five plastic packages, each containing a kilo of high-grade cocaine. First a disbelieving smile and a hint of salivation. Second fear - big time, but then they find out Ben is dead and there's nothing to link them to the coke. Third well what would you do?

242 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1998

Reviews

[Jayne Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this novel four student dropouts, the sort of people for whom irony is a primal instinct, find themselves in possession of a massive quantity of cocaine. Despite the world-weary superciliousness they all exude, they have an almost touching innocence when it comes to hard drugs (‘they’re not actually addictive are they?’). So of course they snort it (despite their impoverished circumstances there’s always a fiver ready to be rolled up and applied to a nostril). Their downward spiral is readily predicted, but it was worth noting that as they were stoned into sincerity, their irony all but evaporated. Now that’s ironic.

It’s very funny in small bursts with some keenly observed details that were amongst the best I have read in a while. On the whole, though, I wasn’t overly taken with it. The point of view skips around randomly – as a reader I didn’t enjoy being catapulted into the heads of characters I hadn’t got to know properly. And the absence of full-stops for about a third of the book suggested the typesetters had their minds on other things. It’s the sort of cautionary tale that makes you feel smugly glad if you haven’t taken hard drugs, but way too explicit to be read to pre-teens in the hope of educating them. Not a high star rating from me, because essentially I wasn’t too bothered what happened to any of the characters and could have stopped halfway without the slightest twinge of curiosity.

[Flinx · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought the book because it looked like an easy read (which it was) but what really convinced me was the "exceptionally funny" caption on the cover. It was, in fact, very funny, with smart, humorous dialogues and surprising, odd turn of events, topped with a cool (yet, obviously well informed) description of the stages of drug addiction.