Review: Fascinating but flawed
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 9, 2012
This is a fascinating book written with some sense of fun yet burdened with the seriousness of the current course of human events, particularly the socio-political condition in the United Kingdom.  The author believes that there is a dystopian future that is almost inevitable unless huge effort is undertaken to make changes.  The table of contents indicates that there are three volumes within this book; there are actually five.In the first volume The New World Order, which takes up almost half of the book, we are treated to an action thriller based on the lives of some of those orphaned in an event twenty years earlier.  There are ominous overtones of a world very like that of Orwell's 1984 but written, in many parts, with more "fun" than Orwell's unrelievedly grim world-view.  Unfortunately, the author does not structure his thoughts well and the thriller sections are bogged down by large passages of speechifying.  Conspiracy theories regarding government /upper-class manipulation clog up the telling of an otherwise good story.  The dialogue is usually lively but is too often preachy.Thereafter the author's shaping of this book seems to falter.  His ideas take on a life of their own, there is much that read like free association into conspiracy theories of current events (the subjugation of the 99 percent by the one percent, what happened to the Occupy movement, etc.) or more or less well remembered bits of popular culture.  The whole of volume 2, The Resurrection of Stephanie White, is only tenuously connected with volume 1.Of the remaining volumes, only volume 3 Down the Dog and Duck appears in the table of Contents.  Volume 4, The Reunion, and volume 5, From Democracy to Dictatorship, somehow have been lost.  This reader must confess to bewilderment.  It is possible there is method to this madness; if so, it is well hidden.  What appears is a hodge-podge of ideas and events not integrated to the story line of volume 1--as if the author had given up and decided to throw in all the material he has gathered and challenges the reader to make of it what one will.  This is a sorry state of affairs.