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Books Related to Kitchen Venom Philip Hensher - ISBN: 0007152426
Stirring up apathy - Rated
Quite the dullest and least engaging novel I have ever read. To paraphrase Chamberlain "far way people about whom we care little".
A previous reviewer has referred to the cool, aloof nature of this book and to the somewhat arcane world of the HOC clerks. Some people may find it all fascinating. This reviewer found the style and the subject matter tiresome.
I should add that I have been a customer of Amazon more or less since it started in the UK and this is the first time I have felt (de)motivated enough to post a review
Coldly brilliant - Rated
I work in the Clerk's Department of the House of Commons, so was intrigued to read this. Apparently the book contains various thinly veiled portraits of Hensher's former colleagues - I think I recognised one or two. Hensher was long gone by the time I arrived but his name is still referred to around the Department with a sort of appalled admiration.
I found the book compulsively readable and beautifully written. It captures perfectly the claustrophobic, secret world of the House of Commons, the strangeness of the place and the people who work there. Hensher's prose is both grand and casual. None of the characters are very pleasant. Although set in 1990 against the backdrop of Thatcher's downfall, the world portrayed has a timelessness. These things combine to give Kitchen Venom a peculiarly aloof quality. Some of the passages about the arcane procedures of the Clerk's Department are likely to be incomprehensible to those who don't work there but they add to the cold oddness of the book, as do the occasional sprinklings of magical realism - such as when Jane, for luck, throws an egg into the air from the roof of the House of Commons and it doesn't fall down. Altogether, this is an unusual, haunting novel.
