The Gun Seller

I don’t usually review books, but since I gave up television for Lent this year, I haven’t watched any DVDs recently. However, earlier this week I really needed a break from law school work, and so I read a novel. What a quaint idea, I know.

The book, The Gun Seller, was itself pretty quaint. The first novel by actor Hugh Laurie, it was pretty clearly influenced by the writing of P.G. Wodehouse (which is actually why I picked up the book in the first place). The book is filled with delightfully pointless sidenotes by the narrator, in the style of Bertie Wooster. For example:

She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes. If you know what I mean by that. Narrowed them horizontally, not vertically. I suppose one should say she shortened her eyes, but nobody ever does.

There are a couple jokes that don’t quite translate to the American ear, the most prominent one being a misunderstanding about a character’s name -- Murdah, not Murder, which, instead of making me have to rethink the spelling of the character’s name, made me have to rethink the pronunciation of Murder. But for the most part Mr Laurie successfully creates a deft and amusing narrating voice, which I loved.

However, the book didn’t rest on just being quaint. Instead our verbally deft narrator is set in the middle of a complicated spy novel. Characters come and go, and their dialogue often doesn’t keep clear their relationships to each other. The book itself is split into two parts, with each part feeling like a completely separate story because the main ensemble cast completely changes, other than the narrator. And if you were confused the first time you watched Mission Impossible, the plot is going to run away from you more than a couple times. My attempt to summarize will hopelessly leave out important plot points, but here goes: Thomas Lang, the narrator, is asked to kill a rich American. He refuses and decides to warn the American, but in doing so accidentally gets involved in a multinational plot to sell weapons to rogue nations, specifically by creating terrorism in order to swat it down. (Think Gulf War newsreels as marketing campaigns.) Lang gets recruited to help destroy the conspiracy, then recruited to be part of it by infiltrating and setting up the terrorist group. And along the way, he falls in love a couple times. Even with first-person narration, it’s difficult to keep track of who is deceiving whom and for what purposes.

The book works best if you’re the sort of person who loves both the TV show Jeeves and Wooster and 24. If not, there will be parts of the novel that feel slow or pointless or confusing. But if you somehow feel you’ve always wanted to read an American spy thriller and a British class comedy at the same time, this may be the only book that can fulfill your need.