Ian Hocking, Proper Job

Seventeen-year-old Andy Carrick is spending the summer before he goes off (maybe) to college ineptly wooing a girl from his past and working—often ineptly as well—alongside his friends Doogie and Old Boy. (The latter is so named because—shades of Seinfeld's Mulva episode—Andy didn't catch his name when they first met and had too soon "passed that conversational Rubicon beyond which it is simply no longer cricket to re-enquire what your new friend is called.") In their quest to hold down a job for more than a day without getting fired, the trio find themselves in increasingly unlikely, often quite dangerous situations. The bulk of the story has to do with their stint as ice cream men, a more hazardous profession, apparently, than most of us would assume going in.

As usual, Hocking's prose is crisp and clever:

"His hair was a dandelion of grey, each hair statically repelled from its neighbour."

"Then he sprinted into the building with the desperate scramble of a father who has left his infant daughter in a receding taxi."

It is also very English, which is to say that the occasional sentence may leave American readers baffled:

"I nodded to indicate that, indeed, I was still at the crease, and any googlie Big Jeff sent my way would be dispatched to silly mid-off in short order."

Cricket, that, I gather.

The story proceeds at a breakneck pace, with amusing scenes piled on one another. But I would have preferred to take things a bit more slowly, with more time to linger on the characters and perhaps even the romance side of things: the book is more about the working than the wooing, it turns out. That said, I enjoyed seeing this romantic comedy side of Hocking and would like to see more should he take a break from sci fi in future. (See my reviews of Hocking's Déjà Vu and Flashback.)

[Disclaimer: since reading Hocking's novel Déjà Vu I have become virtually friendly with the author, and so am not entirely unbiased.]