Last week (Friday evening) I finished Divine Comedies by Tom Holt. This was the first of his books that I had actually read. I had listened to his book In Your Dreams from Audible.com previously, and found it to be very funny and highly engaging. (I just went back to Audible now to try to find the book, and it looks like Audible no longer offers it for sale. What a pity.)
I had a hard time finding Holt’s work here in the United States. The publisher is Orbit Books. Of course, looking at their website, it appears that they have a highly confusing arrangement under which their authors are published by Orbit as an imprint of Hachette Book Group in the United States, and by Orbit as an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group in the United Kingdom. It appears that all of Orbit’s authors in the U.K., available through Little, Brown, are not available in the U.S. through Hachette. (This f’d up arrangement probably has something to do with not being able to purchase the book on Audible.com any longer as well.)
Divine Comedies, an omnibus edition containing two of Holt’s works, Here Comes the Sun and Odds and Gods, are pleasant diversions. The writing isn’t as compelling as some of the other things I’ve been reading lately, nor as strong as Holt’s In Your Dreams, but the stories were fun. Here Comes the Sun is slightly surreal in its narrative, which is only to be expected in a book encompassing all of time/space/creation. I found the writing and use of language to be stronger than in Odds and Gods, though the plot was weaker than in that book. The plot of Odds and Gods is more briskly paced and moves forward in steady progression, while at times Here Comes the Sun seems almost elliptical in its narrative. Holt’s writing is erudite and witty in an English sort of way, i.e., he makes references to classical literature and uses British (Welsh?) idioms. Perhaps this is why his work has not been made more widely available in the United States.
