Let me start by saying I'm
immensely biased in this review. It'll basically be flat gushing all the way through. You could argue that I am the
personification of bias as a concept, and you could be sort of right. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw is basically my idol. If you, hypothetical-and-probably-fictional person reading this, do not know who he is,
here is his most recent video.
So the man's written two books, which are both comfortably within my favorite genre, British Humour. Because it is
British humour, yes I have to spell it that way. I like British humour for its characteristic wit and almost universal tendency to imagine colorful scenarios and populate them with equally interesting and amusing characters. The two names everyone (should) know are Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. Pratchett, of course, responsible for Discworld, the engrossing series of fantasy novels which I quite like in that you can open any particular one and get a pretty clear idea of what is going on shortly, as the series as a whole is more focused on the setting than any particular narrative. Douglas Adams is known for the in-retrospect-badly-titled Hitchhikers' Trilogy (in Five Books), which was one of the earliest respectable books that I read. He's also responsible for the less-appreciated but still brilliant Dirk Gently series.
That's quite enough about other people, though.
Jam is the second novel by Yahtzee, and it's good. Well, I think so. It follows
Mogworld, which was thoroughly enjoyable, but in comparison to
Jam, it just pales.
Mogworld was also thoroughly imaginative and full to the brim with brilliant characters ( one Slippery John comes to mind) and he's been able to do it again with
Jam. Mogworld was an MMORPG (mumorpurger) like World of Warcraft, reworked to be easier on the tongue, "
Massive
Online
Game
World". It deals with a non-player character in said game and his journey to realizing his place in the universe and his long quest to finally, properly, die. That's enough talk about that one.
Jam takes place in the same universe as
Mogworld, but on a real-world scale.
Jam is set in reality, on the plane that
Mogworld exists in as a videogame. The premise of the book is conveniently explained in its first sentence: “I woke up one morning to find that the entire city had been covered in a three-foot layer of man-eating jam.” So we can see that although
Jam is set in real-world Brisbane, Australia (Yahtzee's city of residence), the plot becomes outlandish right from the start, in a satisfyingly British Humour way.
Our narrator, Travis, is a departure from Jim of
Mogworld. Travis is a bit dim, and over the course of the story develops an attachment to a spider which he calls Mary, despite its entirely unknown sex. The band of survivors that form the main group of the book is varied. In bullet-point form, let's list the other main characters and explain why they're so great.
- Tim is Travis's former flatmate. The third party in the arrangement was eaten on Day 1 of the Jampocalypse, as he forgot to look down the stairs before sliding down their railing. Tim now sees himself as the man who will rebuild society, and seems a bit too eager about the whole thing.
- Don Sunderland is a returning character from Mogworld. In it, he was one of the developers of the Mogworld project, and is consequently seen by the NPCs as a sort of god. In Jam, he is a main character. He sees himself as the only sane man, but is driven by an absolutely single-minded quest to retrieve a hard drive containing his magnum opus, and flat-out states he would kill himself if it were to be lost forever.
- Angela is a journalism student with an ever-present camera and a fixation on uncovering the origin of the Jam. She is particularly interested in...
- X and Y, two American government agents with quite a lot to hide.
These characters come together in a fantastic way, and are only complemented by the various settings they traverse in their quest for survival and the equally uproarious figures who populate them. I found myself engrossed in the hilarious society that formed in Brisbane's mall post-Jam. It was where all the hipster kids liked to be, and of course after the Jam hits it becomes an
ironic cult built around a lunatic called Crazy Bob, but with
actual sacrifice and other forms of madness. It all leads up to a conclusion that is suspenseful, comic, and has some actual closure.
That's not to say it's completely without flaws. The characters are hilarious, but sort of without complexity. Of course, it's a comedy, so you don't really need characters with deep and engaging arcs, but still. And the ending, while suspenseful, comic, closure, I've said this already, has parts glossed over. Not the epilogue so much, but much of the climax is handled a bit quickly. It's impossible to go into more detail without spoiling anything, so there you go.
These are just examples, and can't hope to replicate the feel of reading Jam and discovering its gems for yourself. I highly recommend it.
