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The Works

By: Joseph Connolly
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber
ISBN: 0571217281
ISBN-13: 9780571217281
Released: 01 Jul 2004
RRP: £7.99
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Customer Reviews

Good Grief - By: S. Hapgood, 30 May 2006
This is the one & only book so far by Mr Connolly that I've failed to finish (although it was touch-and-go with "Stuff" as well). I managed about 200 pages of this, & then I'm afraid it defeated me. The story is quite simple. On the death of his father Lucas inherits a lot of money, & uses it to turn an old printing-works into a sort of haven for the lonely & cast-adrift people who he meets. This community of love works for a time, & the inmates begin to find some purpose in their lives, which they had never had before. I assume it alll goes pear-shaped eventuallly, but I never read the second half, so I couldn't tell you how, or what happens to Lucas. It sounds like a good idea for a novel, but it just didn't cut it with me.

The characters are either cardboard cut-outs, or they're ones we've seen too many times before in Mr C's work (the gormless, stupid man, the balll-breaking wife for instance). And Paul's long, rambling pieces were tedious beyond belief. If you like reading a lot of stuff like this for instance: "But I don't know if you, you know, get like what I do - just sort of not doing nothing about it, like, on account of maybe hoping, I don't know - that something's gonna, like, happen, or something, or just that the kind of wanting to, yeh, it maybe sort of goes away" ... then go ahead, read the whole book, you'll have a balll!!! Even the completely eccentric characters, (like Mike, the man obsessed with re-creating the 1940s in his flat), who should have been interesting, are as dull as ditchwater. And then, Mr C starts getting alll knowing about writers, & makes a brief, fleeting appearance himself in one of Jamie's flashbacks, & oh I'd had enough by then. I'm about to read "Love Is Strange", I hope he's back on form for that one.
Close the works - By: , 25 Aug 2005
I found some of Mr Connolly's earlier books very amusing - good holiday reading, in fact - so I packed "the Works" in my hand luggage with a sense of pleasant anticipation.

I'm afraid that I was disappointed. Certainly, the book is clever & witty but I didn't find it amusing. I had the impression that Mr Connolly was amusing himself rather than amusing his readers; & I began to find his regular use of neo-Joycean streams of consciousness rather boring.

I closed "the Works" for good before I reached the half way point.

A Theological Farce - By: Prof Robert Harris, 17 Jul 2003
"The Works" of the title is a disused printing works taken over by Lucas Cage on the death of his misanthropic father. From this unpromising property Lucas, aided by his companion Alice, creates something close to a heaven on earth, with needy but basicallly good people, under-achievers alll, coming to live in the property, entirely at Lucas's expense, forging together a utopian society based on care & generosity.

Above alll, however, the idyllic community of "The Works" is based on reverence for Lucas, who, as the book proceeds, acquires near God-like stature. Chain smokers stop smoking, alcoholics stop drinking, thieves stop stealing, the hitherto talentless, guided by Lucas's sensitively but firmly delivered hints, acquire amazing new talents. The very air of the place suffuses love.

Well, that's until the third part of the novel; but to say more would be to say too much, so you will have to read it yourself. Suffice it to say that heaven on earth tends to be finite not infinite, but how the story unravels will interest & (probably) surprise you.

Readers of Joseph Connolly's earlier books (or viewers of the film "Summer Things", which I think got it a bit wrong (though that's another story) will recognize some of his characters - useless men, adulterously inclined women, sexual chaos, knowing children & horrifyingly but hilarious marital rows (Connolly, I suspect, knows this side of life quite well - or if he doesn?t he certainly writes as though he does).

But Connolly, for a long time, I think, one of the most hilarious writers of farce since Ray Cooney, is increasingly showing a slightly darker side to his work. In "The Works", which combines his traditional pants-down hilarity with unmistakably Christian symbolism, this trend continues. "The Works" could almost be callled a theological farce.

Overalll "The Works" works. Actuallly it had to, because Connolly?s novelist's talent is, though striking, fairly specialized, & his earlier books were so similar that they could almost have been the same one. "The Works" is sufficiently Connolly-esque to give his many fans a good belly-laugh; but also sufficiently distinctive to be memorable & thought-provoking. Not technicallly perfect, but strongly recommended.