Disgruntled commuters everywhere
will rejoice over Martin
Harbottle's Appreciation of Time by British journalist Dominic Utton. The novel is based on
the author's true story and
centers upon "Dan the man," a husband and new father who moves to the
English countryside and commutes, via train, to his job at The Globe newspaper.
Fed up with 14 months of chronic delays, Dan, a writer, tracks down the e-mail
address of the railroad director, Martin Harbottle, of Premier-Westward rail
lines and fires off an e-mail expressing his frustration: "My boss was
annoyed with me when I arrived in London; my wife will be annoyed with me when
I arrive home again in Oxford. And none of it's my fault. It's your
fault."
The goal of each subsequent
correspondence—99 e-mails in all—reflects, in tone and length, the duration of
Dan's daily inconveniences due to chronic railroad service delays. Dan believes
that if his time has to be wasted, so, too, should the director's, who
sporadically writes back to Dan with cautious reserve. What begins as an
electronic gripe session spirals into a largely one-sided memoir, where Dan
opens up about his life sharing his tastes in music; his impressions of fellow
commuters; scandalous current events and politics at his newspaper; the
challenges of his home life, especially a wife suffering post-natal depression;
and Dan's temptations with alcohol indulgence and a potential extra-marital
entanglement. All of this adds up to form a wholly original—and very
entertaining—modern epistolary novel.
Note: This review is a
reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission
of Shelf
Awareness. To read this review on Shelf
Awareness: Reader's Edition (3/7/14), click HERE