"Rob Doyle's previous novel, Threshold, took the form of a blackly comic travelogue narrated by an Irish writer named Rob. In one episode before Rob becomes an author, we see him as a sexually pent-up teacher abroad, masturbating over an essay he's marking. That the scene is an echo of one in Michel Houellebecq's Atomised (once named by Doyle as the best book from the past 40 years) hardly lessens our discomfort, and it's hard not to feel that our unease is precisely the point."
"The autofictional game-playing continues in his new novel, Cameo, but instead of self-abasing display, we get a perky book-world send-up for the culture war era, cartoonishly dramatising the ups and downs of creative life. It takes the form of a vertiginous hall of mirrors centred on gazillion-selling Dublin novelist Ren Duka, renowned for a long novel cycle drawn on his own life, the summaries of which comprise the bulk of the book we're reading."
Earlier work took the form of a blackly comic travelogue narrated by an Irish figure named Rob, including a scene of a sexually pent-up teacher masturbating over an essay. The autofictional game continues in Cameo, which delivers a perky, book-world send-up of the culture-war era and cartoonishly dramatises creative life. The narrative centers on gazillion-selling Dublin novelist Ren Duka whose globe-trotting exploits involve drug dealers, terrorists, spies, tax evasion, addiction, threesomes in Paris and a return to Catholicism. Present-tense narration with hyperbolic intensifiers generates momentum, while writerly pettiness and free-floating monologues punctuate and comicize the action.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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