Reading matters

I have only very rarely abandoned a book after reading only the first chapter. I fear I shall not continue with The Vril Codex by Ben Manning. This worries me, given that I am voracious in my consumption of popular fiction and in general forgiving of storytellers whose craft is not always of the highest order.

Leaving this book unread also annoys me at a time when I am researching matters relevant to my own work-in-progress, a narrative set in the Germany of 1936. I devoured C.J. Samsom's Dominion just before starting Manning's novel which I hoped would show me the perspective of yet another author with regard to the mysticism of the Third Reich.

It is also a fact that The Vril Codex has also been reviewed favourably on Amazon and GoodReads. So what was my problem?

"It was a night full of moonlight , and it filled the sky of a bleak Berlin Landscape. Strange sounds echoed around the dark looming fortress from the River Oder."
 
That is verbatim the first sentence of the prologue. I read it several times. My first thought, optimist that I am, was that the writer was being fantastically clever. 

Did I discern an echo of that opening sentence which has become notorious since it was first penned in 1830? "It was a dark and stormy night..." is the often-mocked and parodied phrase attributed to the prolific English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Lord Lytton also authored The Coming Race  published in 1871, a story for which he invented a superior subterranean master-race and the cosmic energy form he called Vril.

This thought, however, vanished when I was distracted by the inelegant use of both 'full' and 'filled' in a single sentence and then the very odd capitalisation of the word 'Landscape'. I began to have misgivings. In the second sentence the reader is asked to accept immediate proximity of the river Oder to a Berlin building. Never mind the next questionable capitalisation, the salient fact is that the river in question is never less than eighty kilometres distant from the German capital.

I persevered nevertheless and tackled the book's first chapter which according to the Kindle progress bar amounted to five percent of the total manuscript. This was not an easy task, made more uncomfortable by formatting which was unsuited to effortless reading. Nor was it easy to deal with the errors of punctuation, the faulty syntax and the tortured grammar as I laboured from page to page. The dialogue passages were constant stumbling blocks and then came the description of a bout of sex which failed to exclude any cliche from the bodice-ripper genre.

Finally I felt quite tired and in need of a sustaining drink. Maybe Bovril would have been appropriate, the marque being the only example I know of Vril making any lasting sense.

How ill-tempered I sound! Fairness will oblige me to send a link to this post to Mr Manning.