Kevin Bridges is one of the best comedic voices to come out of the UK in years, and now he’s joined the line of comedians believing they have a novel inside them that we should read. He should have left it there, sadly, as The Black Dog lacks legs and has no bite. It’s not that funny either — the thing you are banking on.
The premise is faintly ludicrous, the characters thinly sketched and the plot so wobbly that a spoiler alert might not be necessary. A wannabe writer, Declan, has a run-in with thugs, only to cross paths in hospital with his hero: successful writer, actor, and director James Cavani, who is from the same town. Cavani just happens to go way back with the top local heavy, and fortuitously bumps into him again. Figured how this turns out? Yes, Cavani sorts everything for Declan, despite going through his own turmoil with an addict sister, and the star-crossed young shaver and A-lister go off happily to collaborate on a project.
There’s sympathy for Bridges’s debut: he needed a strong editor to chop much of the incidental and pedestrian writing in The Black Dog, the cliches (“a pins and needles-like feeling”, stomach jolts, etc); to tell the writer it required another couple of drafts, to tell Bridges he needed to find his voice. There are the bones of a decent story — a trilogy of longer short stories on the characters might have been a better bet — and his dialogue is good in parts.
If, though, a character is sitting at airports and on flights and in cars, or in therapy, for a huge chunk of the book, as poor Cavani does, then the writing must be vital and original for the reader to make the journey, too. But the writing is one colour. Too many scenarios are dragged out. On one occasion it takes a few pages for Declan to get off the sofa. Or there is so much pointless detail: Declan stops to ponder the meaning of a wobbly lock and in a car Cavani wrestles with existential angst over a ring-pull like he’s in the ninth circle of hell.
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Fans of Bridges will buy this regardless. This reader kept hoping his brilliant stand-up voice would eventually land on the page. But it never arrived.
