This book has some excellent ideas, and some really good passages, but the overall style felt dumbed-down to me, a little larger than life, a little unrealistic. Maybe I'm just getting snobbier and more literary as I get older, but it rarely felt like I was really there, really experiencing what was happening to a real person. It mostly felt like I was reading a book. I spent a lot of time trying to work out if the style was deliberate or not; whether it was an attempt to target a mainstream audience, or a genuine preference for that kind of writing, or just the fact that not everyone can write like Margaret Atwood or Kazuo Ishiguro.

I also got the impression that the author didn't really 'get' some of the traits/contexts of the main character -- his drugs, his pornography career -- to me, the descriptions and way these were worked in didn't ring true. It seemed like they were written about from little to no personal experience and perhaps not enough research. Some of the time the narration seemed to be trying too hard to be clever with imagery and similes, at the cost of drawing me away from what was actually happening, and the character himself.

It's a shame because some of the ideas around the premise could have worked really well. Also, some of the no-holds-barred medical descriptions of a burn victim's experiences were visceral, and gripping. There were places -- particularly in the narration of various legends or myths or fairytales of certain minor characters -- where a different style was adopted. In these parts, there wasn't really a need for realism; it was accepted that the edges were being glossed over, the style was just right, and these parts were the most engaging of the book. I wonder if the author should focus on a whole book of this kind, moving away from attempting to portray the realistic, the everyday.

This is a book I probably would've loved when much younger. I guess I really am no longer the target audience for something like this. You wonder sometimes if a Richard and Judy Book Award is a badge of mainstream-ness in a negative sense, but books like The Time Traveller's Wife and Cloud Atlas manage very well to maintain that mainstream appeal while giving enough of the real, the moments, the character, the proper old-fashioned writing craft, to transport me, to make me believe in it all, however unbelievable the plot, and for me, that's the bar everyone should be looking to clear.