Fiction Reviews
Tick Tock
(2022) Simon Mayo, Doubleday, £14.99, hrdbk, 359pp, ISBN 978-0-857-52661-8
Yes, the Simon Mayo: the BBC radio presenter! So this is another of those books written by people you’ve heard of in another life. I think he’s a good radio presenter. He was a good DJ back on Radio 1 (I’m old, I know) and his film review podcast with Mark Kermode is most entertaining. But a writer? I’m assuming he didn’t have the same kind of hassle the rest of us face in getting a publishing deal, but you never know. So the cynic in me opened the pages of Tick Tock warily, but hey, for all their limitations I enjoyed Richard Osman’s runaway bestsellers, so maybe media personalities can be the next Booker winners?
Tick Tock’s not going to win the Booker. Or the Hugo’s. But it’s considerably more entertaining than I’d expected, and I’m happy to give it a cautious thumbs up.
The plot doesn’t break much new ground and I think it’s too early for a novel like this, but this kicks off as a pandemic story about a new disease in its early stages. It veers off into espionage thriller before the bodies start to pile up, but the gist is that kids in a London school start to get a ticking in their ears, which leads to deafness, which leads to death. Soon there are outbreaks throughout London and elsewhere, including a cluster in Salisbury, where much of the action takes place (expect a connection with real events). The story follows Kit, Head of English, and his daughter Rose, plus his girlfriend Lilly, who helpfully turns out to be a virologist. Rose’s friend starts ticking and so Rose sets up a WhatsApp group to gather stories, starts a school closure protest, is blamed for a hospital riot and attracts the interest of the press. Lilly’s estranged father has just died too, but there’s something odd about the mourners in the crematorium. Jess, Rose and Kit flee to Salisbury (where all plot threads lead) to find answers. Various Government agencies start to show an interest, and they’re not all benign.
All tenuously sci-fi, of course, but it is an extrapolation of current trends and past events so it just about slips under the wire, though I suspect Mayo and his publishers would describe it as a thriller (and I doubt you’ll find it on the sci-fi shelves). Grounding it in a London school makes it more prosaic than I’d like, and the tight character focus means the wider pandemic story never gets a chance to properly develop. It’s a slow burn too, but it’s an easy read and I didn’t see the twist coming, which always suggests good writing to me. Some of the cover quotes are hyperbolic, so I’d advise ignoring them (you really can’t ‘feel the tension and fear in every page’) but it’s competent enough. And entertaining.
Mark Bilsborough
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