The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer, 2024
My track record for predicting how celebrity novelists are going to pursue their novel series is poor. I predicted Richard Osman would kill off one of his main characters in the second instalment of the Thursday Murder Club, but after four novels in the series they are still all going strong. Then n my review of The Satsuma Complex I forecast that it would be a one-off and we would hear no more of Gary, Emily and Grace – which was equally off-target!
The Hotel Avocado is the sequel to The Satsuma Complex (are we going to see a series of fruit based novel titles from television’s latest national treasure?) Set almost immediately after the events of Satsuma, Emily has inherited her father’s hotel in Brighton and started to renovate it. Gary remains working in his law firm in London, travelling down to see Emily at the weekends. He has to decide whether to commit to his relationship with Emily and move down to live with her in Brighton, leaving his neighbour Grace to a rather lonely life, or whether he tries to make a long(ish) distance relationship work. Emily seems content with the relationship as it is – she is working flat out on preparing the hotel for opening and has no time in the week for romance or relationships. Her plans for the hotel are greatly helped by Mark her very hard working but socially awkward facilities manager and Pete, her super-efficient painter and decorator. Things are complicated by the fact that Emily and Pete once dated and clearly retain a residual attraction for one another.
Both Gary and Emily flirt with breaking relationship boundaries. Gary invites a work friend, Roma, to sleep over at his flat, and Emily gets uncomfortably close to Pete. While neither are unfaithful the implication is that their relationship is vulnerable. All that becomes rather redundant when the main plot line of The Satsuma Complex resurfaces. The end of that novel left Gary waiting to be a key witness in the trial of several corrupt Metropolitan police officers. He is visited by the menacing Mr Sequence and his equally violent sidekick Brian, and offered money not to testify at the forthcoming trial. It is made very clear what will happen to him if he refuses. He can’t go to the police over these threats and attempts to pervert the course of justice, because the corrupt officers have friends still on the Force. Gary flees to Brighton, but Sequence and Brian track him down – they always seem able to predict his movements – and Emily and her hotel are dragged into the affair.
For a comic novel, the scenes in which Gary and Emily are menaced with increasing ferocity by Sequence and Brian are quite dark and slowly come to dominate the novel. People get hurt with the promise of a lot more to come. The bad guys are convincingly violent and uncompromising and there’s little Gary can do to protect himself and his loved ones other than comply with their threats. The whimsy that dominated the first novel fades into the background as Emily and Gary are bullied, menaced and beaten. In a sub-plot Emily applies for planning permission to hang a massive avocado sign outside her hotel as an advertising feature and bribes the chair of the planning committee to ensure permission is granted. When it is refused she installs it anyway and the sign quickly goes viral.
Surprisingly I actually preferred the crime elements of this novel compared to the quirky comedy. They don’t always sit together comfortably and while we know that Gary and his friends will be OK in the end, there aren’t many laughs in these scenes. But I thought they showed signs of more care and attention from the author – once freed from the burden of trying to make the reader laugh he can get on with telling what became a quite gripping story. The element of peril was real – or as real as it can get in a comic novel. We also see fewer autobiographical elements in the novel (unless the author once ran a hotel in Brighton) as the author moves away from his source material, which helps give the narrative more freedom. Slowly the potential of the author as a serious novelist, rather than (god-forbid) someone cashing in on his celebrity, is emerging.
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