James, Charlie Hamilton

AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:

1 out of 5

(1 book)

The Matewix

The sharper ones among you will probably have already worked out that this is a parody of 'The Matrix' (and 'The Matrix Reloaded') in much the same vein as the Barry Trotter books or 'Bored of the Rings'.  The story follows the sad hacker Newo, and his speech impediment, as he gets drawn into the bizarre world of the Matewix by Amorphous and Titty. 

Unfortunately, this book takes the lowest-brow approach to humour that it possibly could.  Wherever a nob joke, a swear word or a sexual reference can be stuffed in, in it goes.  If any name from 'The Matrix' can be turned into any sort of pun (preferably involving a human body part) then it is. 

The narrative is awful, repetetive and, this is the shocker, worse than that of 'The Matrix Reloaded' itself.  On top of being low-brow and poorly written, this book could also be seen as extremely offensive.  Its sexist, homophobic and at times xenophobic. 

There are a couple of moments when the author comes up with a genuinely sharp satirical comment (the stuff about Smiff and Amorphous' palagarised philosophy  is one), or a joke that does hit the intended schoolboy-esque mark (Newo's rant about ranking, for one).  However, these moments are few and far between and not worth the effort of getting to them.  In fact, the metaphor that jumped into my head as I was reading was 'shovelling through a ton of shit to find a penny'. 

For a while I considered giving this book a score of two in recognition of its occasional funniness, but I soon came to my senses.

1 out of 5

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