Book #9 - King of the Badgers

What can I say about King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher?  I really hated this book.  The purported plot of the book centers around the disappearance of a child.  However that only takes up about half of the 436 pages.  The rest mainly centers on a lonely gay man and follows various other characters habiting the small town in England where the missing child was abducted.  It felt disjointed and wandering. 

I don't have much to say, so I'll use a quote from Francine Prose's review in the New York Times which expresses my feelings much more eloquently than I can.


"This is satire at its most superficial, filled with meanness unredeemed by compassion, notable for its lack of heart and its catty superiority toward hapless characters jerked around and mocked like contestants on a Japanese game show. And just when you may be trying to recall when you last read a novel whose author showed such contempt for so many of his characters, the plot takes a turn toward the melodramatic. The secrets grow sillier, the events less plausible, the punishments visited on the innocent harsher and more severe. Eventually things are sorted out and most loose ends tied up."


I have been somewhat disappointed in the fiction books so far. I'm really hoping the next one is better or I may end up just reading non-fiction selections.