Shade
New Member
I picked up this book when the author was doing a signing in a local bookshop: there was nobody else about and I kind of felt sorry for him... Anyway, we chatted briefly as he was signing it and he asked me if I read a lot, to which I replied Yes I do, and he gave me a card and asked me to email him with my thoughts once I'd finished it.
The card surprised me, as it was a business card for the publishers themselves - a local outfit I hadn't heard of called Indiego - but had the author, Nick Cann's, name and email address on it. So was this a self-publishing effort? My heart sank. The answer, by the way, is not quite, so far as I can tell from this blog entry which collects a lot of posts about the book from around the web. It seems that Richard Gibson, who runs Smyth & Gibson, Belfast's excellent seller of posh handmade shirts, read the manuscript of Jake's Eulogy and liked it so much that he and his girlfriend set up Indiego to publish it. Well, I haven't emailed Nick Cann with my thoughts, because it turns out that as a literary talent-spotter, Richard Gibson makes a great shirt-seller. (Which he is: can I have a free shirt now, Mr G?)
Still, he did corner his friend Dylan Jones, editor of GQ, to provide a quote for the back cover: "Everybody should read this book before they die..." Now, apart from my amazement that he really said or meant this, I'm mildly annoyed that it's followed by "- Dylan Jones, GQ Magazine", suggesting that he praised it in the pages of the magazine, which he clearly didn't. Similarly, and rather bizarrely, there's this quote: "'A brilliant debut' - Nicola Jeal, The Observer OFM" - which seems even more impressive, until you realise that OFM is the Observer Food Monthly magazine, of which Nicola Jeal is the editor - and, I am guessing, another friend of the publisher. However: all this is par for the course for a small press trying to punch above its weight, and there are a couple of genuine reviews too from local papers; and none of this would have mattered if the book was as good as they say.
The premise is interesting: the title character, Jake McCullough, has died, and his old friend Charlie Clarke has been asked to give a eulogy at the funeral. The trouble is, he hadn't seen Jake for years, and when he sets out to speak to people about what Jake was really like, he finds out more than he expected... So. The book is described as a 'black comedy' on the blurb, but this could hardly be more misleading. Black yes, bleak yes, downbeat and grim and depressing, yes yes yes: among the book's contents (spoiler alert) are a man drinking himself to death; two children being beaten to death with baseball bats; and a life brought to misery by repressed homosexuality. And these are not peripheral things: they all concern the two main characters and have pivotal roles in the book. So for this sort of content to try to rub shoulders with 'comedy' was always going to be difficult. The comedy anyway turns out to be thin on the ground - a few forced one-liners, plus one wildly misjudged storyline whereby (seemingly at Cann's whim, and for hugely implausible reasons) the body of Jake is accidentally switched at the mortuary and the wrong body gets taken to the family. When they discover this, there is about half a page of confusion before they - including the dead man's grieving widow and mother - decide "it doesn't matter"! Similarly, the solemn plot points mentioned above are mostly glossed over. It's what Cann does throughout: run past a subject or a scene or a character rather than stop and look at them in detail. Almost everything is told, not shown, so it all feels artificial and the scenes and descriptions don't last long enough for the reader to become involved in them.
I'm guessing that despite his - and his friends' - contacts in the world of media and publishing, Nick Cann was unable to get Jake's Eulogy accepted by an existing publisher, hence the existence of Indiego. Like most self- (or quasi-self-) publishers, he probably should have considered in more detail why it wasn't accepted, and the book, promising in subject, could have been so much better as a result. On the evidence so far, however, Nick Can't.
The card surprised me, as it was a business card for the publishers themselves - a local outfit I hadn't heard of called Indiego - but had the author, Nick Cann's, name and email address on it. So was this a self-publishing effort? My heart sank. The answer, by the way, is not quite, so far as I can tell from this blog entry which collects a lot of posts about the book from around the web. It seems that Richard Gibson, who runs Smyth & Gibson, Belfast's excellent seller of posh handmade shirts, read the manuscript of Jake's Eulogy and liked it so much that he and his girlfriend set up Indiego to publish it. Well, I haven't emailed Nick Cann with my thoughts, because it turns out that as a literary talent-spotter, Richard Gibson makes a great shirt-seller. (Which he is: can I have a free shirt now, Mr G?)
Still, he did corner his friend Dylan Jones, editor of GQ, to provide a quote for the back cover: "Everybody should read this book before they die..." Now, apart from my amazement that he really said or meant this, I'm mildly annoyed that it's followed by "- Dylan Jones, GQ Magazine", suggesting that he praised it in the pages of the magazine, which he clearly didn't. Similarly, and rather bizarrely, there's this quote: "'A brilliant debut' - Nicola Jeal, The Observer OFM" - which seems even more impressive, until you realise that OFM is the Observer Food Monthly magazine, of which Nicola Jeal is the editor - and, I am guessing, another friend of the publisher. However: all this is par for the course for a small press trying to punch above its weight, and there are a couple of genuine reviews too from local papers; and none of this would have mattered if the book was as good as they say.
The premise is interesting: the title character, Jake McCullough, has died, and his old friend Charlie Clarke has been asked to give a eulogy at the funeral. The trouble is, he hadn't seen Jake for years, and when he sets out to speak to people about what Jake was really like, he finds out more than he expected... So. The book is described as a 'black comedy' on the blurb, but this could hardly be more misleading. Black yes, bleak yes, downbeat and grim and depressing, yes yes yes: among the book's contents (spoiler alert) are a man drinking himself to death; two children being beaten to death with baseball bats; and a life brought to misery by repressed homosexuality. And these are not peripheral things: they all concern the two main characters and have pivotal roles in the book. So for this sort of content to try to rub shoulders with 'comedy' was always going to be difficult. The comedy anyway turns out to be thin on the ground - a few forced one-liners, plus one wildly misjudged storyline whereby (seemingly at Cann's whim, and for hugely implausible reasons) the body of Jake is accidentally switched at the mortuary and the wrong body gets taken to the family. When they discover this, there is about half a page of confusion before they - including the dead man's grieving widow and mother - decide "it doesn't matter"! Similarly, the solemn plot points mentioned above are mostly glossed over. It's what Cann does throughout: run past a subject or a scene or a character rather than stop and look at them in detail. Almost everything is told, not shown, so it all feels artificial and the scenes and descriptions don't last long enough for the reader to become involved in them.
I'm guessing that despite his - and his friends' - contacts in the world of media and publishing, Nick Cann was unable to get Jake's Eulogy accepted by an existing publisher, hence the existence of Indiego. Like most self- (or quasi-self-) publishers, he probably should have considered in more detail why it wasn't accepted, and the book, promising in subject, could have been so much better as a result. On the evidence so far, however, Nick Can't.