Mad Chapman the Spinoff Editor and Claire Mabey Books Editor discuss Carl Shuker’s new novel, which happens to be about an editor.
Claire: Mad! You’ve just finished The Royal Free! What are you thinking of it?

Mad: Hey Claire just finished the book and my first thought after a lengthy year of editing probably was not the best to read a story centered on an editor. However was completely captivated during the first third of the book the last two thirds my mind started to wander and ask questions about several things. What d’you think?

Claire: I was wondering if the stuff about creating a style guide and editing would tie in for you, even though it was tied to James and his role as an editor for The Royal London Journal of Medicine (a fictional journal modeled on an actual journal where Shuker once worked). Like you, I found I needed to really engage with this book. There were moments that sent me scurrying back to re-read sections that seemed quite linguistically impenetrable or places that seemed to have eluded something important. Yet the story of James’s doings and the violence always looming in the background had me completely absorbed. Now, as I get into the concept of editing, I wonder if I have gotten it too far…

I liked talking about language and how unpredictable it is with those features, but I think those would work better for someone who wasn’t already thinking about commas. There were times I had to go back over passages because I was sure I missed something. Yet more often than not, I hadn’t missed anything, which is my main complaint about the book (getting right to the point). The office atmosphere, which seemed to display the “clever” components, appeared to stress style over substance although perhaps that is intentional given that the protagonist is supposed to edit the style guide.

I think this is my verdict – the novel is generally pretty honest, if not thoroughly idealistic. Such as: ‘“‘Ha ha,’ he said, then at some kind of rest and with not a trace of bitterness in his voice, he put his cup in the dish-rack and the scrubbing brush across the backs of the hot and cold taps where it always lived, and said, and his New Zealand accent was very strong and he sounded quite small, ‘Weird, eh.’’” Some elements may be perceived as slippery and sinister by nature; for example – ‘Fairy’ illusions of inexplicable floods that disappear, ‘Magic’ coincidences like the uncanny mongrel haunting James’s baby after his wife’s death leaves him a ‘single’ parent. At one point, the story nearly disintegrates and lapses into multiple points of view (we even get chapters from infant Fiona’s angle), making me think James has total restriction over this story, filtering certain information such as his wife whom we never see or get introduced to. I thought the linguistic layer was thrilling, especially when I isolated it, precisely because of its very form; but I kept seeking a reason for it and was thinking that here is all James molding the picture of his life, his choices and experiences.
Angry: This is ridiculous, and I might miss half the message in the books I read. But: the book blurbs, with “equal part workplace comedy, home invasion thriller, and literary conundrum,” do clue the reader in to some pretty high hopes. So: I really liked the home invasion thriller part and if the literary conundrum had worked as seamlessly as that into some kind of nod to the author’s trade, I probably would have liked the technique even better. Sadly, I didn’t find it to be an equal-opportunity workplace comedy, which lessened the effect of the charmingly odd stylistic tics and left me wanting something less than a straight-ahead thriller.