Hatchet Job of the Day

The most recent editor of Treasure Island may have given Andrew Motion’s sequel the thumbs-up but Claire Harman in the Evening Standard thought he was lost at sea: 

It’s not just that this plot is both boring and implausible, the characters as wooden as absent Silver’s leg and the sentiments screamingly anachronistic (the good guys are all 21st century liberals), but at every turn the former Poet Laureate clogs the works with verbiage. Every act of senseless violence Jim witnesses prompts a gem of cod philosophy or a reverie on his mental state and at every crisis a dreamlike inertia takes hold, as if the characters all sense that the author lacks the correct co-ordinates.

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