Title: Sudden Wealth
Author: Robert Llewellyn
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 360
Rating: 3.5/5
This is the first of three Robert Llewellyn books that I picked up as part of a job lot on eBay. I was super happy to find it because Llewellyn played Kryten in Red Dwarf, which is one of my favourite TV shows. I knew that he had an autobiography, but I didn’t know that he’d written a few novels.
Even after finishing this, I’m not entirely sure what I made of it. There are some flashes of genius and some flashes of mediocrity, and it does read like a book written by an actor and presenter as opposed to a professional writer. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
One of the main elements of the plot here is that there’s a therapist who specialises in doing a type of extreme shock therapy. He threatens to kill clients and has fake terror attacks set up to scare the crap out of them. The idea is that if they’re unhappy with their lives, he can make them grateful to be alive by taking them to the point of death.
There’s also a lot of stuff about Europe, the European Union and the Euro, which is interesting to read in a post-Brexit society. We have to bear in mind that this book was written and published in around 2000, and the concept for it came about towards the tail end of the eighties. You can sense that in a lot of the story elements.
The time at which the book was written also leads to some interesting technological references that feel dated today, from references to satellite phones to one of the characters having a high speed dial-up internet connection installed. But in a way, that had to happen, because technology is one of the core themes to the novel.
All in all, I’m glad that I picked this up, but I think that the only reason you’re likely to enjoy it is if you’re a Robert Llewellyn fan and you want to see what his writing is like. So yeah!
