A Year in the Merde was one of the funniest ‘Englishman abroad’ books for years. It started as a word-of-mouth self publishing project in Paris, that eventually found a publisher and then went word of mouth through the UK two or so years ago. I must know four people who have read it, which for anything other than Harry Potter is pretty good going.

So it was predictable that there should be a follow-up. Merde Actually it is.

The title is a pun (apparently) on Love Actually, the film, as it’s all about the fictional Paul West’s attempts to find love while opening his English tea room in a Parisian suburb. It’s an obscure link. Nonetheless, things start out well. His tales of courgette and fruit picking in the south, bad French driving and overbearing mothers in law are laugh out loud, but as he leaves the south and returns to Paris, things start to go awry. And not only in his fictional life.

It seems that Paris sucks all of the comedy out of the piece. The prose remains flowing, but the scenarios are plodding and dull, and although there are asides aplenty that do just enough to keep you wondering what might be coming up next, they are rarely delivered upon, and soon your interest in the central character is gone. For a book written in the first person, that’s a fairly serious problem.

I plodded to the end of it. My 20-page-a-day habit slowly declined to 10 and then five as it became little more than a time-filler while waiting for tubes, and by the last page I wasn’t sad to be putting it down for the last time.

Paul West should have been a one-book character, and Stephen Clark, his creator, should have turned his attentions to a new project rather than a follow-up or, if the money was too good to turn down, at least left his character out in the countryside where he was funnier and more endearing.

But then Mayle’s already done that one.

I’d give it two out of five, and that’s for the first third of the book. If it had been like the second half the whole way through it’s unlikely I’d have read it at all.

1. Merde
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