The Little People

This book is elfcentric, the first one I've read from Mr. Holt. Still, it's a good, amusing book to read.

When it's a story about a little boy who sees an elf at the bottom of the garden, who grows up into a larger sized little kid, still intimidated by his menacing step-dad, and daunted by his own uselessness and general futility of life, we know we are in for another Tom Holt variety show.. With a Darth Vader step-dad and a loony mother, poor Michael doesn't have a great deal of back bone. But that's ok, beacuse his best friend at the mostly-boys-only school is Cruella, and she has attitude in spades. It seems that Daddy George (the Darth Vader step-dad) has enslaved a whole lot of elves to work in his shoe factory. Altough it takes a lot to get Michael to the point of seeing himself as their saviour, he eventually (and with a lot of prodding from various plot contrivances, and baleful girls, not to mention saccharine elves) makes an attempt to find out and fix whatever his relatives have been up to. Being who and what he is (a monumental screw up of the kind only teenage and gormless boys seem to acheive), the operation is doomed to failure, a fact he recognizes from the outset. Slow in places, and at times a little too carried away with describing the interminable boredom in interminable detail, this book is nontheless very enjoyable. Through reading, I've been moved to push quotes from the book upon people. Michael is very reminiscent of Prachett's Rincewind, only done in Holt fashion. The spineless acceptance of fate & realization of his place on the food chain make them very similar. Holt imbues a waft of romance to the book via Cruella, and it's refreshing (The Portable Door has been his other major excursion into "happily ever afters") only I felt at the end of the book he has somewhat betrayed his characters the ending they deserved. It's as if Holt was happy writing the middle and just before the ending experienced a disappointment that forced him to conclude the book on bitter note, instead of the humorous twist which he usually leaves the reader with. A poignant paragraph: "..difference between romance and real life. I think they probably have tupperware hearts in Elfland, thin and bendy and impossible to break, and thus not worth having. This side, we have the real thing; we have all the real things, good and bad, and it's the fact that they can be lost and bruised and broken that makes them valuable. They have all the looks and the style and the flowering cherry trees, we have grotty streets and lousy weather and love that can't be Araldited back together again if you're cack-handed enough to drop it. They have elves who can edit out the bad and boring bits and live for ever; we've just got little people, living short lives, living every second of them, whether we like it or not." The little people of the title is multi-layered, and not just the obvious reference to elves /gnomes it seems to be at first. Enjoyable and humorous although a little meandering. Kotori December 2004 - [email protected]