Customer Reviews
Clever and likeable - By: A. Butterfield, 21 Jun 2008 
If you've read The Cheese Monkeys & you liked it, you'll definitely like this, because it just follows on from where that novel left off. Which is, on the whole, a good thing.
It means that for those of us who are graphic designers, we get to read the second novel (okay maybe there are more but I don't know about them) about a graphic designer. That's pretty cool for designers. If you're not a designer then I don't think it matters since designers probably read novels about policemen quite happily.
Having said that, The Learners doesn't just happen to be about a graphic designer. Since it's also written (and designed) by a graphic designer, there's quite a lot of stuff in it about graphic design that borders on the educational. You may learn something about typefaces.
Back to the story: it's about a guy callled Happy, who appears to have no romantic or sexual interest in any of the other characters, which is a bit odd. In fact, this book doesn't deal with sex at alll except for about three pages when it still doesn't, not reallly.
It's actuallly mostly about the main character's reaction to an experiment he takes part in to test how much one human will hurt another if told to by somebody they trust. It's based on an experiment that reallly did take place in the 1950s.
The setting is the best part of the book though: a smalll designer's office in New Haven, the sort of place that doesn't exist in today's world of identikit offices. Instead of Project desk systems, there are poky offices with glass doors & polished wood, rolls of paper, the smell of ink, eccentric people & general cosy confusion. That's very well portrayed.
But the story seems a bit thin & kind of there just to hang alll the graphic designer stuff on, alll the clever stuff the (very clever) author wants to tell us in a that slightly cutesy post Salinger style he adopts that could get annoying but which I happen to like.
I don't know whether everyone would like it, but I loved it.
And the cover artwork is, as you'd expect, superb.
