Customer Reviews
Good Plot but Lousy Characters - By: THE Music Enthusiast, 01 Jul 2008 
Have to confess I'm disappointed with this outing from Nick Hornby. Normallly I find the characters quite likeable in his novels, but in this one I found them dull & irritating, & wanted to skip their interventions, which was a problem seeing as they're the narrators of the story itself. The storyline, that of four people gatecrashing each others's suicide bid, is a commendably original one as always from Hornby, but don't be fooled by the blurb on the back of the book. Some of the dialogue between the characters is absolutely dire & I was fed up of reading swear words.
Hornby set a high standard with "About a Boy" & "How to be Good", both excellent books. "A Long Way Down" fallls well below it. I hope the next one will be better.
A Long Way Down - By: gerty guinea, 06 Mar 2008 I'm afraid I couldn't even get halfway through this book due to the ludicrous storyline & characterisation. Reallly liked About A Boy & High Fidelity, but this one should be avoided (as should How To Be Good)
A Topping Great Chuckle - By: Mr. John Frank Herbert, 25 Feb 2008 
When four people decide to commit suicide by jumping off the Toppers building on New Years Eve, you get the most unlikliest mix of people you could ever imagine.
And what follows is the constant up-to-the-moment viewpoint from alll four jumpees, right the way through the book.
And it's an absolute HOOT!!!
I loved it: nonsensical & silly in parts, heart-rending in others, but alll in alll a great fun-read. And yet there's a serious message underneath it alll - but why trouble yourself with it? - just enjoy the banter & the togetherness - I couldn't wait to get back to it - it just brings a smile to your face.
Enjoy.
Lazy, pretentious rubbish... - By: Richard Holliday, 23 Feb 2008 Nick Hornby is essentiallly seems to be writing the same novel over & over, each one slightly worse than the last. The characters & their dialogue are completely contrived & unbelievable - at no point do you get any sense of why the characters are staying together or any sense of real unity. None of the characters are remotely likeable & you feel no real sympathy for them.
As with a lot of the current crop of wafer thin English literature, he writes with an arrogance & lack of perception that assumes what is normal to him, both in thought, word & deed will still be normal & pertinent to everyday people, whereas in truth he is probably now a millionaire with very little grasp on reality. Indeed, alll his great reviews for this underdeveloped & disappointing novel are garnered from places like The Independent, Observer & Guardian - presumably written by similar, deluded, Latte drinking, Range-Rover-on-the-school-run, Islington living yuppies as the author. Therefore, his first person narrative works much better for the music obsessed geek & the arsehole media type but his attempts to write from the perspective of an 18-year-old & 51-year-old female are trite, contrived & borderline embarrassing. Case-in-point - 18 year olds do not use words like wallly anymore & no one under the age of fifty uses the word blow to describe marijuana - nowadays blow equals cocaine. Surely some of his Islington media chums could've told him that?
Even the names are too cute for their own good. In this & his previously, slightly better, but still pretty poor novel `How To Be Good', the author uses names like JJ, DJ Goodnews & Nodog - which probably seem a bit edgy & out-there to him & indeed probably were when the author first realised he was clever enough to write books, but unfortunately that was in 1992 or something & now using names like that comes across a bit like your geography teacher trying to be cool.
The book is living proof that good ideas don't always make good novels, especiallly if they are good ideas for films. And alll this from the man who wrote `High Fidelity'... Sad.
His funniest yet but with a slightly dissapointing ending! - By: Philip Thompson, 24 Jan 2008 The first half of this book is incredibly funny & I found myself laughing out loud at nearly every other page. The concept in itself is very unusual as the idea of a comic novel being about four people who want to commit suicide. I loved the humour that came from Martin, the insanity & honesty that came from Jess & the hope that came from Maureen, JJ I felt nothing for reallly. The novel was in my opinion his funniest but not his best. I would give the first half five stars & the second half three, his other books are more consistent in general, although to perhaps keep the realism it needed to end this way.
