True Romance?
- ihvj: the love code by Foster Grant
THEY KILLED PRINCESS DIANA - NOW THEY'RE TRYING TO KILL HIM
Some-time journalist and TV newsman Foster Grant had been getting used to the good life: minor celebrity, a beautiful young wife and a secret job dropping messages and collecting information for MI6. But now it's all gone wrong. His wife is unfaithful, the divorce has turned ugly and expensive, and at the precise moment he meets the woman of his dreams he discovers the secret MI6 will kill to conceal. When the most powerful forces in the land are ranged against you, where do you run to? Where do you hide? Who can you turn to?The answer must be found, or Foster Grant's name will be added to the growing list of friends and allies who make the fatal mistake of trying to help him, and the secrets he has uncovered will lie buried for ever.
On the back of reviewing the enigma that is Foster Grant’s, The Rose, here are my thoughts on his sequel, a story whose time frame strangely overlaps the previous novel. The reasoning behind Grant’s choice to do this is unclear, but the early sections are repetitive for a reader coming to ihvj after reading The Rose as I did. Though told subtly differently and through another voice, the events are already familiar. Well beyond catch-up, at times it felt like I was re-reading the same story, and the result of this unusual decision causes the narrative to sag right from the start (the best place to lose a reader). It’s an odd thing to do, and at first, it seemed almost like an early or updated draft of the other book.
Thankfully, the story moves on from what I knew already and into new territory. And the shape of that territory is enemy. Grant goes on to write with the same fast-paced thriller technique he employed so well in the closing scenes of The Rose, but here it’s ramped up further to craft a breathless narrative and a plot of mounting craziness. However, before we get there, there’s another story he wants to tell us. A love story.
The sugary romance is so well imagined that at times I felt like I was in the room with this couple. It felt awkward. And while we’re here, a quick note on the audiobook. The prose is nicely delivered by Alex Cooper who addresses the protagonist’s lover but, because the audio narration includes a woman voicing the character to whom endless sentiments are aimed, it really starts to feel like a private conversation. It’s so sweet, it’s sickly – no one wants to be a party to the sweet nothings spoken between lovers. And the more it goes on, the harder I found it to listen to. And it goes on and on. For me, the female voicing the lover is just too much. It felt jarring and inappropriate. In my opinion, a first-person delivery to the reader would have been so much better than this.
But do my feelings of unease over the romantic content mean it’s just good writing? As is typical with Grant’s work, I was unsure if this was skilled penmanship or instead, based too closely on a real relationship. What’s described is a deep love, so deep in fact that I had to wade through this section up to my waist, if not my neck. Truth or fiction? Whichever way, it felt overdone but, here’s the thing, once I got to the closing chapters of the book, I realised that it needed to have been so – my complaint over the audiobook aside perhaps, it was purposeful.
But at times, I didn’t feel settled with the format of this book. A slightly awkward fusion of a highly sentimental love story and conspiracy theory. This was true for the last book however – and I enjoyed that one very much. As for the conspiracy theory, yet again I got nowhere searching online for the author’s fictitious father and his campaign to tell the truth behind the emergence of AIDS. It’s odd – like the last book – the story is presented as an autobiography but it’s unsubstantiated in the real world, so then, is it fiction?
The book can be split into three parts. The first, with all the backstory that I knew already, I could do without. The second, the love affair, parts of which I could do without too - but crucially, the book couldn’t. And the third section where the plot develops (very nicely) and the action takes place is really the book's core. And there’s a welcome twist at the end that comes as a huge relief, which I really didn’t see coming.
Characterisation is good, particularly as with The Rose, in the women. Grant’s M16 handler is notably well-written too. As for the main protagonist, Grant appears almost as fully formed here as he did in the previous book. Perhaps the wilder plot of ihvj reduces the believability of Grant’s character by a degree. All the scenes are well rendered, description is good throughout and the technical quality of the writing is, as with The Rose, faultless.
Comparison with The Rose is unavoidable since the two books overlap, to some extent covering similar ground. I found IHVJ an engaging and enjoyable read but I would say that of the two, The Rose, being centered on the conspiracy theories surrounding Diana’s death, held far more interest for this reader. Had I read them the other way around I may have felt differently but who knows for sure. I like Grant’s writing style very much, he’s certainly a skillful author, and I for one would like to read more from him.
About the author
Not Foster Grant