Fact is, A COMPLETE FICTION is a joy to read, a roller-coaster ride that hooks from the first paragraph and relentlessly refuses to let go till the last satisfying page.
R.L. Maizes amazing narrative is a comedy thriller with a dash of court room drama and political intrigue fuelled by rejection, rivalry, revenge and the inevitable repercussions.
It is an indictment against the cankerous cancer culture of social media mob mentality.
P.J. Larkin has written three unpublished novels and is desperate for her latest, a #MeToo story, to find a publisher, so she can quit her job as a ride share driver. Dark and political and loosely based on the sexual assault of her sister by a state senator, this latest novel has a lot riding on it.
After a call from her agent telling her that no publisher wants her book on account of the market being saturated with #metoo stories, P.J. happens upon a piece in a publishing industry publication and reads a one sentence description of a book titled Up The Hill that could easily have been a description of her book, Halls of Power, if you changed the gender of the main character.
In a fit of pique, P.J. powers off a social media post accusing the author of Up The Hill of plagiarism, opening up a can of worms that make compost of truth and lies, secrets and revelations, and weave a narrative as crazy as a box of frogs.
A COMPLETE FICTION examines the very serious questions of who has the right to tell a story, and where the line sits between artistic inspiration and plagiarism. “Write what you know” is the common advice to writers but how close a characterisation to a real living person, especially a relative or friend, or to a real event, can fiction qualify over fact? Is it infringement of imagination when it impinges on the privacy of the person with that lived experience?
Humour is a knife and Maizes wields it with precision making incision after incision, and zeros in on the zeitgeist of the twittering class and all its contemptible cohort and promotes Zero tolerance to the toxic waste of tabloid texting, eschewing those people who hunger for anger and are not sated until scandal cascades into a cataract of catastrophe.
Pin-balling between the two protagonists, the narrative buzzes like a disturbed hive, the work of a natural narrative technician, wry, witty and skewed.
If you’ve ever read a book or never read a book you should read A COMPLETE FICTION.
A COMPLETE FICTION by R.L.Maizes is published by Text.
