The Mayfly

Main Review:

As i said when i reviewed The Maltese Falcon; I don’t really do ‘thrillers’.

Now that’s not to say that I have anything against them in principle, they’re just never really top of my list to go for when I’m perusing for my next read. But on a whim a few weeks ago, I clicked on an Instagram advert for a company called ‘A Box of Stories’. Their whole deal? They send you four ‘expertly curated’ books to enjoy, claiming that by buying the books through them, you’re saving them from being turned into pulp. But as I got started with James Hazel’s The Mayfly, the first of the books they provided, I couldn’t help but think that maybe the book would have been better off as kindling.

My concerns were raised almost immediately when I noticed that the opening text of the book was a quote by world’s most over-praised psychologist Sigmund Freud. Having just come from a book all about genocide and imperial oppression, you can imagine my surprise when Nazi concentration camps turned up in the second chapter. After jumping between three characters in as many chapters, the book finally settles on its main protagonist – a former police officer turned lawyer called Charlie Priest, a textbook ‘brooding but talented’ investigator. All of the characters introduced to us by Hazel feel much more like a selection of tropes rather than a fully realised character in their own right. The black character is a hulk of a man, the female character is young, ‘not like other girls’ and harbouring a not-so-secret crush on her boss, whilst the firm’s financial officer is ‘a numbers man, a hopeless conversationalist and [therefore] probably autistic’. Whilst all of these characters feel shallow, it feels especially cheap in the case of the accountant, trading as it does in out-dated, inaccurate ideas about autism; perpetuating the idea that autism is a very specific way of being, rather than a whole spectrum of conditions. As I went through the book, I noticed that every female character within the book is either young, unbelievably beautiful, and possibly evil, or old, bland-looking and a bit dull. The only older woman who isn’t presented this way? She’s the villain of the whole piece. Groundbreaking I know. Not only this, but several of the women are threatened with sexual assault throughout the course of the novel – because as we all know, you can’t have a ‘gritty’ story without sexually abusing your female characters.

Everything about this book feels generic and formulaic, even to someone like me who doesn’t read these sorts of books very often. The bickering between Priest and his brother, where they compete to reel off a bunch of uninteresting information about the people around them struck me as being almost identical to the scene from Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows where Sherlock and Mycroft try to out-deduce the other. In fact, the whole book seems determined to come across like a Guy Ritchie movie. Not a good one mind, like Man from UNCLE, more like one of the weaker ones like the King Arthur movie.

The book did elicit a few chuckles from me as I went through, but at least one of these was definitely not intentional on the part of the author. Specifically, it was the part where, having learnt that the big bad of the story was a neo-Nazi death cult, the narrator commented that there had not been a significant resurgence of Nazi ideology in the UK. I read this whilst scrolling through Facebook seeing pictures of fascists urinating on memorials, fighting police officers, and performing Nazi salutes in front of the Cenotaph. I for one miss the days when Nazis were disposable video game enemies and the subject of wacky conspiracy theories, not bald middle-aged men complaining about “political correctness gone mad”.

I decided very early on that this book wasn’t for me – and I have no doubt that this definitely tinted my perceptions of the book as I was reading it. I do have to admit that once I got started with the book, I managed to get through pretty much the whole thing in the span of a single long afternoon. Whether this was because the story was gripping or because I couldn’t wait to be rid of it, is hard to say. When the ending does come, it’s more of a fizzle than a big crescendo – with a generous dollop of a Deus Ex Machina to actually help wrap up all the threads.

Having finished the book, I really cannot imagine myself recommending it to others to give it a go. It just felt so ‘by-the-book’ that I imagine that people who read these sorts of books more often than I would probably grow tired of it even quicker than I did. I have noticed the book appearing in multiple adverts for Box of Stories, which suggests to me that clearly SOMEONE likes it enough for it be to sent out to a lot of new customers. Hopefully I’ll have better luck with the other three books I was sent – including, amazingly, a book written by Pope Francis himself!

If you want more info about A Box of Stories, you can find out their options here. If my review hasn’t put you off the idea of buying books blind, you can get a discount on your box by using the link here.