And just when you expect this to develop into a rounded exploration of modern religion, it stops. And repeats itself. Rather than explore new areas the same idea is relentlessly blown further and further out of proportion. More and more betting shops are set up, further religions go bankrupt, more people rally against Edgar's domination, and no new ideas are introduced. The idea of the narrator being a shopping trolley is obviously a great catch as far as marketing the book, but irrelevant to the story.
Fowler gets around the problem of how to have a trolley narrate by ignoring the problem.
The story is told in a semi-documentary style, covering large time spans and several major events all within a few sentences. This feeling of being given an overview of the situation serves to show the redundancy of the shopping trolley, who is himself rarely involved in any of the events taking place. Witty it certainly is, and there is a lot of substance to the social satire, particularly with regard to the problems of blind faith and organised religion. What the book does manage to show is that religion is still as relevant a topic as two thousand years ago, the same arguments, however presented, still leading to the same lack of definitive conclusions. Also this month in Pure Fiction Paperback Reviews .