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Paul West, hero of this fourth book in the 'merde' series, is on an all-expenses paid holiday in the South of France with his beautiful blonde girlfriend Gloria Monday, or M as she prefers to be known. He has also been asked by his best friend Elodie to provide the catering - Paul is a chef and part-owner of a Parisian tea-room - at her wedding; she is marrying into a very rich, very exclusive and very snobbish family who thoroughly disapprove of both her and Paul. Events reach a whole new level of difficulty when it proves that far from attempting to stop caviar smuggling, M's real mission is in fact to assassinate the President of France - and he is coming to the wedding. In most mysteries revealing so much of the plot would be a capital offence, but as all of the above can be gleaned from the back cover it can hardly be said to constitute a spoiler here! In fact DIAL M FOR MERDE is a comic romp with the only mystery being M's motivation - something which I found patently obvious; but a little more of that later. As a comic romp it is almost unnecessary to say that the characterisations are stereotypical and two-dimensional and the descriptive writing perfunctory; that is the nature of the sub-genre. The questions which have to be asked are is it funny and is it a romp? As to the former I am forced as ever to fall back on the cliché that humour is a matter of individual taste. If you like lots of jokes centred on Anglo-French misunderstandings (and the book also belongs to a tradition of writing which centres on this subject) and the complexities of the French language for those ignorant of its nuances, DIAL M FOR MERDE is certainly for you. I found it mildly amusing but certainly far from hilarious. As a romp it is much more successful ; the action pushes along at a very good pace particularly as there is no thought to interrupt it. My one major problem with the book is that for a romp to work wholly successfully there has to be nothing of reality, of real pain or emotion or depth, to disturb the portrait of human existence as a frothy barrel of laughs. Subjects like cuisine, snobs and sex toys (all featured here) are ideal in this respect. However M's motive (I said I would get back to it), which was so obvious to me, belongs in a different book - it is full of real pain and is a deeply serious subject both emotionally and politically. It is therefore not suitable for the romp treatment and I have a moral as well as literary objection to its use in this way. Once thought intrudes the book's appeal disintegrates. Putting this to one side, which for the vast majority of the book it is very easy to do, DIAL M FOR MERDE works well enough as a comic romp; this is a book to be read when you are in search of a few hours of mindless entertainment. Treated as such it succeeds by the main criteria of being mildly funny and very well-paced; the romp works better than the comedy but it still succeeds in diverting if it is diversion that you seek.
Reviewed by Nick Hay, January 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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