Dave - It's a bit far-fetched. The aluminium in aluminium pans is released by cooking highly acidic food in them - the example always quoted is boiling rhubarb. I don't think boiling or frying potatoes or a potato-and-flour dough would do the trick. That's leaving on one side the question of health-and-safety inspections. And the idea of a mob of London bankers pursuing a drunken Irishman through the city streets in order to beat him to death is also a bit hard to swallow.
The characters are rather undifferentiated from each other, Richard disappears out of the story about halfway through, and there's no insight into the mindset of the bankers. As far as the story's concerned they're just the bad guys - but of course bankers don't see themselves in this way. To make a story like this really interesting you have to be able to get inside the heads of the baddies as well as the goodies. Having said this, the story has got certain good things going for it. It's extremely readable. It moves fast from one development to the next. The slightly-unhinged Danny is an interesting character, with both good and bad aspects to him, which helps to give the narrative a feeling of moral complexity (good people can do bad things when they're under pressure), and this stops it from being too simplistic. You do convey a real sense of how economic conditions can drastically change people's lives. You've also got some quite nice thematic links going on - they way Joey's bad dream comes true at the end of the story, and the idea that "repetition is the key", which crops up a number of times. - Edward _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
