Didsbury Book Group

I don’t like football.

There, I’ve admitted it. I tend to be the person looking around confused in a pub after a team scores. It has, unfortunately, separated me slightly from some of my football loving friends. Given all that, I don’t really read football literature.

The good thing about this book, for me anyway, is that football, whilst instigating events and being vitally important to some characters, is not what it’s really about. The meat of the book is in human interaction and in coping with a tragedy.
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I always feel a certain amount of trepidation before reading books like this. Best seller in 2005, on the New York Times list for 21 weeks and a finalist for the Michael L. Printz Award in 2007. Not to mention all the hype on the net and from people who’ve read it; the build up gets so big it gets harder to appreciate the story.

So, does this book deliver? Well, nearly. To extend the metaphor, I think it’s been delivered to a house a couple of doors down from me and now Amazon won’t give me a refund.
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I have vague recollections of seeing one of the many dramatisations inspired by this novel. I think I found it quite dry and pointless, as well as far from the ‘Horror’ it poported to be. I thought I’d give the book a chance though as, with very few exceptions, ‘the book’ is generally better than ‘the film’.

Blimey.
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I actually joked with someone the other day that this review could be called ‘Enduring this book’. Now that I think about it, that’s not too far off the mark.
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*Quick note: The picture above is actually from the movie based on the novel. I just think it’s a far more evocative image than any of the book covers.*

If I were to guess at what a book called ‘Perfume’ was about, I’m sure that all my guesses would not even come close to this macabre tale of human depravity.
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