The '86 Fix

I had been feeling as though my reading was getting a bit serious lately, so decided to dive as far down the intellectual spectrum as my collection allowed. But I went too far, much too far...

Keith A. Pearson's The '86 Fix is, on paper, exactly my kind of book - a sci-fi comedy escapade in which a middle aged man is transported back in time to his teenage years and is given 48 hours to preemptively-with-hindsight right the mistakes he made at the time and hopefully end up much happier and more successful in future - distancing himself from the school bully who is about to fire him, preventing an unhappy marriage and perhaps even saving lives. And yes, it is all of the above things, but Pearson manages to obscure what should be an interesting (if not hugely original) concept behind walls of atrocious writing.

Maybe I'm elitist, maybe I'm spoiled by having had the opportunity to read a lot of classic literature, maybe I should have tried harder to put the issue to one side, but this is a relentlessly badly-written book. The protagonist, Craig Pelling, sees fit to spell out his every thought and emotion, relevant or not, explains his life in painstaking detail and describes his teenage mistakes to the extent that the solutions he eventually comes up with - and it's not until a ludicrous 50% of the way through the book that he actually travels back in time - are predictable long before they happen. What should be easy prose drags drearily on (at one point we are treated to a description of putting on trousers that essentially amounts to "I put my right leg in one hole. Then I put my left leg in the other hole."), there isn't a single likeable character to be found, and while the action taking place in the past is slightly more compelling, Pearson fills the second half with further events that hadn't even been hinted at before, leading to a cut-and-shut plot that then comes abruptly to a halt in a somewhat rushed manner. All in all, it made the likes of Nick Spalding read like Oscar Wilde - low-rent, easy-reading comedy can be done well in the right hands.

Couple that with endless forced references to '80s Britain - it's set 5 years before I was born and I've never heard of the likes of Texas Bars or Quarto soft drink, so they can't have left that much of a mark on the nation - and The '86 Fix was a book that I just couldn't get on with. And yet I finished it, so have to give Pearson some credit in terms of just about keeping the action rolling along. There was the occasional humorous moment or memorable one-liner, and Pearson does do a good job of portraying a character who knows his flaws and can't help but dwell on them. I hate to admit it, but the ending did leave me wanting closure, so I will probably slog through the sequel at some point in future.

1.5/5

So. Many. References.