Don't Point That Thing At Me (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
”Destroying the painting was out of the question: my soul is all stained and shagged with sin like a cigarette smoker’s moustache but I am quite incapable of destroying works of art. Steal them, yes, cheerfully, it is a mark of respect and love, but destroy them, never. Why even the Woosters had a code, as we are told on the highest authority.” Johnny Depp plays Mortdecai in the 2015 movie. I’ve not seen it, but most of the reviewers are torching it. Regardless, I will eventually watch it.”Charlie Mortdecai is a cad of the worst kind. He is educated, capable of refinement, a degenerate member of the upper crust, a gluttonous eater of fine foods, a dabbler in fine art, and a man readily admitting that he lacks moral courage. He is completely untrustworthy except when it comes to doing what is absolutely best for Charlie. He quotes P. G. Wodehouse though he has little in common with Bertie Wooster, except for an occasional bout of self-centered bumbling, and certainly his thuggish manservant Jock Strapp is no Jeeves. When a Goya goes missing, Mortdecai is the primary and only suspect. He is given a visit by his arch-nemesis Martland. ”Martland has only two personalities--Wilde and Eeyore. Nevertheless, he is a very cruel and dangerous policeman.” After Charlie, with the help of Jock, convinces Martland to beat it, Mortdecai starts making plans to sell the painting because, of course, he did steal the painting. ”The truth had to be delivered in carefully spaced rations, so as to give him a healthy appetite for later lies.”Now Martland, and it turns out others, isn’t trying to get the painting back to return it to the rightful owners. They are planning to steal it from the thief and sell it themselves. They are quite willing to step over the cooling corpse of a certain Mortdecai to do so. Mortdecai might be portly, but when his life is on the line, he becomes very light on his feet. He hides the Goya in his Rolls Royce and has it hoisted on to the boat that will take him to America to meet his Southwestern American buyer. When he arrives in America, his first challenge is conquering the Old Oklahoma Cattleman’s Breakfast Special or the O.O.C.B.S.. It is a thick raw steak, a hunk of salt bacon the size of Jocks’ fist, sourdough biscuits, a pot of hot coffee, and a half a gill of rye whiskey. ”Britain’s honour lay in pawn to my knife and fork.” If there is ever a man who can overcome a pile of food, it is Charlie Mortdecai. ”Tis from scenes like this that Britain’s greatness springs. I accepted a free drink from the barman, shook hands gravely and made a good exit. Not all Ambassadors sit in Embassies, you know.” Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie will forever be Jeeves and Wooster for me. There are certainly many oddish references to Wodehouse’s famous creations in this novel.His next challenge, with some form of special police hot on his tail, is arriving to meet his wealthy American buyer only to greet his mortal remains. Now unscrupulous American buyers for stolen art are not that easy to come by. They are as rare as moments of morality are for Mortdecai. This is a pickle of a different hue. The luscious and lascivious widow proves to be friendly even though she doesn’t imbibe with Mortdecai’s favorite concoction on earth. Is it possible to trust anyone who…?”’I never drink alcohol. I do not like to blunt my senses.’‘Goodness’, I babbled, ‘but how awful for you. Not drinking, I mean imagine getting up in the morning knowing that you’re not going to feel any better all day.’‘But I feel lovely all day, every day. Feel me.’ I spilled quite a lot of my drink.‘No, really,’ she said, ‘feel.’I gingerly prodded a golden, rounded forearm.‘Not there, stupid; here!’ She flipped a button open and two of the most beautiful….”I’ll leave it to your imagination as to what sprang out of her blouse. Things go from dire to disastrous, and Mortdecai finds himself on the verge of epic failure without a pot of hot tea or a pint of whiskey anywhere in sight. In fact, Kyril Bonifiglioli leaves our anti-hero in such dreadful straits that I will have to read the next book in the trilogy to see how Mortdecai, even with the survival instincts of a trapped rat, extracts himself from certain extinction. The interesting thing about this book is that I approached it thinking it would be a breezy affair, a bit of irreverent humor with an adorably unlikeable character that would make for an enjoyable afternoon. What I found was, yes, it is humorous and bawdy, but it is certainly not breezy. I had to pay attention, because the cheeky references and the amusing asides were coming fast and furious. This is a short book by most standards, but it is certainly packed with deftly conceived sentences that sometimes required a second pass to catch the undertow of impertinent meaning. Ma’am would you mind stepping a bit closer….Kyril BonfiglioliThe author’s description of himself lends me to believe that many of Mortdecai’s more salacious personality traits may have been drawn from his own character. He was an art dealer, accomplished fencer, a fair shot with most weapons, and a serial marrier of beautiful women. He claimed to be ‘abstemious in all things except drink, food, tobacco, and talking,’ and ‘loved and respected by all who knew him slightly.’If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Imagine a story told by Paul Whitehouse’s character Rowley Birkin QC - “Blahblahblahblahhorsesblahblahmuttermutterpaintjobrhubarbrhubarbblahblahofcourse… Iwasvery… very… drunk!” - except vastly more coherent so you can understand every word but so scattered that it may as well be muttered gibberish. That’s essentially what reading Don’t Point That Thing At Me is like.Charles Mortdecai is an aristocratic art dealer who’s fallen in with a bad crowd. The police are after him for an alleged art theft and some shady types are on his tail but it’s ok because he’s very, very drunk. The cover blurb compares the unpronounceable author Kyril Bonfiglioli’s novel as a cross between Ian Fleming and PG Wodehouse – if only! Charles is always drinking and some guys get shot around him so I suppose that’s where the Fleming reference comes from – a couple of details that sound Fleming/Bond-like and nothing more – but the Wodehouse? Hmm, no, that would mean Bonfiglioli’s funny and he’s not.I suppose at the time it was hilarious to read lines like “The man was looking at me askance. ‘Why are you looking at me askance?’ I asked” as the first person novelistic narrative bleeds over into pseudo-realistic dialogue, but these days? Meta has been done a great many times since, not just in novels, so it’s not as fresh as it once was or at all funny. And no, Bonfiglioli didn’t pioneer that style.Despite being a short novel, the turgid sentences soon slow down the narrative to a near-stop – and it’s not like it was fast-paced to start with. The scenes are mostly Charles drinking in various places while tediously “bantering” with the other flat characters. You have to be very careful when reading this because when a “character” gets shot in the head, it’s literally dealt with in one sentence before Charles hurries off to resume drinking elsewhere and it’s not brought up again ‘til later. Don’t want to do anything difficult like write non-static scenes, what?After struggling through nearly 50 pages (of this 160+ page novel), I just gave up. Maybe having a protagonist who thinks he’s funny because he drinks, is rich, and tediously makes fun of everyone for not being funny, drunk or rich like him, is entertaining for some readers - not for me. I even tried drinking while reading this crap and it only underlined how unfunny Bonfiglywhatever is! Why republish this outdated, unknown-for-a-reason rubbish? The character’s exploits have been turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp, scheduled to flop next year, so Penguin are cashing in. A roguish main character played by Depp who’s drunk all the time, talks nonsense, and stumbles around like a buffoon – well, it’s good to see Depp stretching himself. Savvy?
What do You think about Don't Point That Thing At Me (2004)?
I was lured into buying this book during a 5 minute dash into London's Daunt books. What lured me in was the recommendation by Stephen Fry on the cover. I will admit to feeling a little a bit cheated, as it's a very odd book indeed and I am very glad that I didn't buy any more of the series on impulse. I read it, but the main character is abhorrent, the plot labyrinthine and impenetrable (and possibly in the end superfluous) and tho' it looks like he dies in the end, apparently he doesn't, as there are others in the series. Happily for me, I will not be reading them.
—julie
I wanted SO BADLY to like this book -- the descriptions of it being a mix of Wodehouse and Fleming make it sound tailor made for me -- and I did think the writing itself was amusing and intelligent. But amusing and intelligent writing deployed in service of an unpleasant and often incoherent plot is just wasted. By the close of the novel, I had only the slimmest idea of what had happened -- and the infuriating notion that I'd have to read the remaining books in the series to be anything like sure. Unfortunately, I'll likely have to remain frustrated in my curiosity about the book's events, because I don't think I have the patience to put up with Mr. Bonfiglioli's confounding plots for another 3 novels in order to be sure.
—Emily
Like many, I was only made aware of Bonfiglioli's "Mortdecai" series after seeing the bizarre trailer for the movie adaptation starring Johnny Depp. Though I had no interest in watching a grotesquely mustachioed Depp gallivant around for two hours, I was intrigued enough by the premise of the book series and its being described as a cross between Ian Fleming and P. G. Wodehouse.Given how singular and brilliant Wodehouse is, it's a risky move for an author to seek out a comparison. And Bonfiglioli is not subtle about it - he has Charlie Mortdecai invoke Jeeves and Wooster directly in the early pages. I initially scoffed at this, and adopted a somewhat detached attitude throughout the first two-thirds of the book.The tide turned a bit for me, however, after a distinctive late passage in which Mortdecai tells a story about a former client's attempt to smuggle a painting by Crivelli, an Old Master, out of Italy. He had a friend paint over it in a "Futurist-Vorticist rubbish" style, carried it out of the country, then sent it to a restorer with instructions to clean off the modern paint and expose the original. After a few weeks, the restorer reported that he had removed the modern paint, removed the "Crivelli," and exposed the original portrait of Mussolini that was underneath it all. Why is this significant? Well, I took it to be self-referential. Many readers (like me) would be likely to dismiss this novel as nothing more than a "rubbish" modern rip-off of "old master" like Wodehouse. However, Bonfiglioli would claim that even Wodehouse is just a veneer over top of something banal, or even evil. Is Bonfiglioli calling Wodehouse a fascist? Perhaps. So, I suppose Bonfiglioli could be claiming that in the modern era (the 1970's, in fact) the foppish egotism of Bertie Wooster can be seen as the foppish psychopathy of Charlie Mortdecai, and the high Edwardian mannered standards represented by Jeeves is, in reality, the simple-minded brutishness embodied by Mortdecai's man-servant, Jock Strapp. The thesis for the novel, then, is that there is nothing, in fact, amusing, charming, or forgivable about these characters, and we were romantic fools to believe that Wooster and Jeeves were to be admired as well.Maybe that reading is giving too much credit to Bonfiglioli. But the novel does take a decidedly dark turn following that passage about the Crivelli, and things start to fall apart for our heroes, so I'm choosing to read this book as a deconstruction of the Wodehouse mythos and just pray that Johnny Depp doesn't decide to play Bertie Wooster next.
—Jim Loter
