This may be damning with feint praise, but William Boyd’s “The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth” is the kind of book you should take on holiday with you. Inoffensive, easy-to-read, unchallenging; perfect for the beach or to snuggle up with by a fire in a country cottage.
It’s well written – which is one of the things that makes it easy to read – and I suspect the style is a deceptive one; fluid, languid – lazy almost. It probably lulls you into a false sense of security which means you miss things; the sorts of things only a second reading will uncover.
But then a lot of books are like that aren’t they? And though I liked Mellmoth well enough, I’m not going to be re-reading it anytime soon…
Ian Gouge - Writer 