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Second Term
423 pages, Paperback
First published October 19, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 12, 2015
I hate giving any novel one star, especially now that I know how difficult it is to write a book of any kind and to get it published. However, one measly star is what I would have given "Second Term" if it hadn't made me laugh so much. It gained an extra star for that.
This isn't a comic novel, so don't let the laughing part mislead you. Rather, I usually found myself laughing in disbelief at the astonishingly-clunky sentences and clumsy metaphors it contained.
I can only assume the book was rushed out, and thus was never edited, as it also contains some of the most confusing syntactical errors I've ever seen, and it's often impossible to tell which character a verb is intended to refer to, until you've re-read a sentence several times, and then taken a wild guess.
This aspect of the writing came as a big surprise, not least because Mr Walters is a professional journalist, who presumably knows how to write grammatically-correct and accessible non-fiction... unless he usually relies on the editors at the papers he works for to make sense of what he's written!
To sum up, I only carried on reading to the end of this novel because, as an ex-politico myself, I was interested to see how closely the plot would turn out to resemble the Blair/Brown conflict. If you aren't interested in politics (as so many people seem not to be), then I'd suggest you don't bother reading "Second Term" at all.
This isn't a comic novel, so don't let the laughing part mislead you. Rather, I usually found myself laughing in disbelief at the astonishingly-clunky sentences and clumsy metaphors it contained.
I can only assume the book was rushed out, and thus was never edited, as it also contains some of the most confusing syntactical errors I've ever seen, and it's often impossible to tell which character a verb is intended to refer to, until you've re-read a sentence several times, and then taken a wild guess.
This aspect of the writing came as a big surprise, not least because Mr Walters is a professional journalist, who presumably knows how to write grammatically-correct and accessible non-fiction... unless he usually relies on the editors at the papers he works for to make sense of what he's written!
To sum up, I only carried on reading to the end of this novel because, as an ex-politico myself, I was interested to see how closely the plot would turn out to resemble the Blair/Brown conflict. If you aren't interested in politics (as so many people seem not to be), then I'd suggest you don't bother reading "Second Term" at all.
December 15, 2013
An underrated and generally undiscovered classic! This book is the best political fiction I have ever read. It is a kind of parody of Blair, Brown and Alastair Campbell, featuring a young popular New Labour style PM coming to the end of his first term and trying win win re-election. The Brown style character is not the Chancellor, its the Deputy PM, and the Campbell style character is the book's main protagonist, a Scottish female press officer with cutting wit and a great strategist, who is really the brains behind the re-election operation.
The book was written before September 11th but has some spookily prescient themes - terrorism and war against Iraq, that wouldn't have been directly on the agenda at the time the book was written. There is also a referendum on the Euro which makes for the book's most dramatic chapters.
There are some great plot lines and plot twists here and if this was made in to a TV series it would be a major hit.
This book is not widely available so you might have to buy it online second hand etc but if you are interested in politics this is a wonderful read.
The book was written before September 11th but has some spookily prescient themes - terrorism and war against Iraq, that wouldn't have been directly on the agenda at the time the book was written. There is also a referendum on the Euro which makes for the book's most dramatic chapters.
There are some great plot lines and plot twists here and if this was made in to a TV series it would be a major hit.
This book is not widely available so you might have to buy it online second hand etc but if you are interested in politics this is a wonderful read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews