Starred review from April 25, 2016
In his first novel, Armstrong, an accomplished film and television writer (Veep, Black Mirror), directs his wonderfully arch gaze on a vanful of do-gooders venturing into war-torn Yugoslavia. Following in the footsteps of Susan Sontag, who famously staged Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, the motley collection of activists decides to “take a peace play to Bosnia and extend the evolution of humanity to a new continuum.” Armstrong satirizes the group’s naïveté, pretentiousness, and blinkered humanitarianism masterfully, all the while sketching a convincing portrait of the Balkans in chaos. Narrating the fiasco is Andrew, a British construction worker with “one of the most coherent foreign policies of anyone working on a building site in the Manchester area.” He is motivated less by a conviction that the play will succeed than a crush on one of the group’s members, Penny, the beautiful daughter of a well-connected lobbyist who strongly disapproves of the mission. Andrew is a Lucky Jim type, alternately feckless and impish, who gets himself into a series of mortifying or perilous situations, living to tell about it in his amusingly ironic voice: “It was just so dangerous to bury bombs where people might walk,” he complains after wandering into a minefield. He is also fundamentally decent, and, unlike some of his companions, a keen observer of the farcical, futile mission. Like the best comedic war literature, Armstrong’s novel is ultimately a tragedy of the absurd.
April 1, 2016
A Welsh construction worker risks his life for love when he falls in with a band of privileged do-gooders on a mission to war-torn Bosnia circa 1994. Debut novelist Armstrong is a star in Britain for writing Peep Show and In The Loop. He demonstrates his dizzying talent for comedy here in a clever if deeply cynical satire about love, war, and disappointment. Our entry into this adventure is Andrew, a working-class bloke just coming off a long, bad relationship. By accident, he falls in with Penny, the idealistic daughter of wealthy liberals, who declares her plans: "Bob is driving the minibus and we're going to Bosnia to stop that war." This doesn't mean that Penny is solely naive. "Everyone's corrupted by money, Andrew," Penny says. "But you have to be careful of the rich, because they know exactly how fucking nice it is." Soon Andrew is on the road with Penny; the aforementioned Onomatopoeic Bob; Shannon and Sara, a pair of combative lesbians; and Penny's junkie brother, Von, who happens to be carrying a rock-band-worthy parcel of drugs. Half the book is a very funny road trip through the back alleys of Europe as Penny writes her terrible "peace play" and Andrew vies for her affections. Armstrong ratchets up the venom as they push further into the war zone and Andrew's mates have to reconsider their moral imperatives in the presences of mercenaries, fixers, snipers, and heavy artillery. "Because if by some dash across a checkpoint I could get three thousand, or even just three hundred, men, women and children to safety, if I could shield the last infantryman as he planted the final flag of multi-ethnic victory, then yes...I would make the sacrifice," Andrew admits. "But getting my throat shot out by a sniper on my way to see The Three Amigos badly dubbed at an open-air screening? That wasn't really for me." A very funny British road comedy laced with ecstasy both real and imagined.
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May 15, 2016
As a writer for the British television program Peep Show, among others, Armstrong is known for his lovably pathetic characters who stumble into absurd misadventures. His debut novel promises the same. Fresh out of college in 1994 with no clear direction but with a steady supply of weed, Andrew meets Penny, a wealthy playwright who has joined a ragtag group of idealists in a plan to restore peace to the war-torn Balkan region. Deciding he's enthusiastic about foreign affairs, and getting into Penny's pants, Andrew convinces the group his knowledge of the Serbo-Croatian language will come in handy. But as the troupe members get deeper into their mission to perform a peace play from the back of a van, Andrew becomes consumed with his internal struggles against the poet Simon, his rival for Penny's attention, and himself as he hides the truth about that whole Serbo-Croatian thing and wonders whether risking his life is worth a chance at love. Armstrong's hysterically neurotic novel about a troubling conflict offers a scathing look at art, youthful passion, and political zeal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)