Boating for beginners

What went wrong? Winterson created my first midlife crisis when she - aged the same as me - created heaven on earth (and a lot of money) with "Oranges are not the only Fruit" and "Sexing the Cherry". Then along came "boating for beginners." The word plays now were tired, the labrythnthine visions

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dull, the tone snide. It was the end of a happy reading backwater.

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good comedy is a delicate operation--one needs to nail it without nailing it down--and here winterson just tries too hard, forcing swinging widely and missing wildly.

An early Winterson, Boating for Beginners is certainly not written in the usual poetic language she employs in most of her works. It is, however, a good laugh. Indeed, I agree with Andrew Sinclair, who is quoted on the back of the book, that admirers of works like Monty Python's Life of Brian will

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enjoy this re-telling of the Book of Genesis. There's your entrepreneur Noah, and his close friend, the romance writer who churns out novel after novel, and the cook who is a devout believer, and her daughter who is just coming to, and the sons of Noah who just want to be loved by their father, and their wives who have their own bizarre work to do, and Doris, the cleaning-lady-film-extra who is fascinated by the meaning of life, which she believes is death... And on and on it goes into a crazy, clever, and funny story of the coming floods.

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