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** spoiler alert ** "If I could give this book a minus score, I would."

[It's perhaps important to note that this review also contains SPOILERS to the movie Sixth Sense...] It also contains swear words - you've been warned.

I've never felt so angry about a book; even Howard's End (seriously, Howard's End didn't have one single yacht in the whole book!). Maybe my anger stems from the fact that I had so much looked forward to this book. This was my only requested Christmas present last year. I loved the idea when I read the preview in The Guardian. Perhaps my anger is borne out of a frustration about how bloody long it took to read the fucking thing. More likely I'm so furious because it's clear - now I've finished it - that there is no clear and prescribed method for actually reading the book!

Let me expand: the book itself is not actually called 'S.' (with such a pretentious title, I really should have known better!) it is instead entitled The Ship of Theseus. The ten chapter abstract account chronicles the last days of a man with amnesia. More importantly it is an allegory for the life of the mysterious author VM Straka and a secret group of artists-come-activists-come-revolutionaries called 'The S'. However, the really original approach this book takes is that there is another narrative penned in the margins: the lives of two literature students (one past one present) who write to each other in the margins of a library copy of The Ship of Theseus - which you have in your hands. Moreover, there are a number of different pen-colours for their scribbled conversations, hinting that THOSE colour string together different periods of Jen and Eric's lives. It hints. These students may or may not be in peril, threatened by what they refer to a 'The New S'; a malevolent version of the old "Goodie S" I assume. Then there are the footnotes, written by a translator who proclaimed to have known, in some small measure, the elusive Straka. These footnotes may contain clues or codes. Tucked throughout the book are lots of titbits like postcards or newspaper cuttings etc. All of these might have codes in too. In the very back of the book is a decoder wheel, I think.

Look, I can tell you're already thinking, "wtf?" but allow me to deepen that confusion somewhat. Because you have perhaps six separate narrative strings all draped across each other running from page to page, it is a point of conjecture as to how the book is actually supposed to be read! Seriously! There are webpages dedicated to that question! "How did you read S.?" I'll tell you how one reads a book, shall I? Front to back. Perhaps the one exception is the Fighting Fantasy series of books I read as a child, wherein you could choose the flow of the narrative by choosing where each paragraph leads next. These books weren't read front to back; but that's ok: they came with clear instructions! Their premise was explicit! S. instead assumes far too much. I, for one, will read a book front to back. If I know there are bits of crap tucked in the pages, I will - perhaps naively - assume they belong where-the-hell they are! If they almost drop out, like the decoder wheel did endlessly, I will ensure they remain tucked in, and certainly won't ruin the story for myself by glancing at them! It'd be the same as skipping ahead to read the ending, no? Who does that?

Well, it turns out anyone who wants to read S. properly HAS to do that. Turns out (see what I did there?) that the decoder wheel is required throughout the book to help decipher various codes that are hinted at. To what end? I don't know! You see, I read books FRONT TO BACK! And I'll be fucked if I'm going to indulge Dorst and Abrams with a single moment of attention after the penning of this review. I get the impression - again from using t'interweb - that it might be a very different read by reading it through on each colour of margin notes, for example. But why would I do that to myself?

Maybe I'm angry about this book because I'm too stupid to understand it. There are many websites dedicated to how awesomely awesome this awesome book awesome is. It's not. I propose that people who think it's awesome are the same people who laugh uproariously at jokes they don't understand. I wanted to get this book, I really did! The problem is that there is nothing even vaguely entertaining here. If one has to approach this book like a Times Crossword then tell us! Otherwise someone like me will approach it like a BOOK! WHICH IS WHAT IT FUCKING IS! The very fact that there is so much conjecture over how the thing should be read means you've not done your job as a writer!

But look, in truth I know precisely why I'm so mad about how truly awful this book is, and that reason is the fundamental flaw in the venture: Once again, JJ Abrams has forgotten that, no matter how clever you think you are or how original you believe your idea to be, if there's no story in your book, it's going to be a huge waste of time. MY time! The back of the book, the blurb that many traditional readers WON'T READ, says that this project was Abram's homage or love letter to the written word - or some such twatery. If that's true, the actual delivery of this project clearly shows Abrams doesn't understand the written word. And when you look at his other works like LOST or even the rebirth of the Star Trek films, you can see the same fundamental flaws:

Abrams (and by association on this project Dorst) doesn't write good characters. Characters are the most important part of a fiction narrative. Authors like the late Richard Laymon or even the likes of JK Rowling are/were masters of developing characters you like. Once you like them, whether they be goodies or not, then you care what happens to them. In S. you never know who Straka was and the only thing you learn is he was more interested in his own 'work' than pursuing the love of his life - a woman he'd never actually met. So how can we care about these people? We can't. And then you have Jen and Eric; a pair of deeply unlikable, overreactive, arrogant, self-centred tossers. Don't care. And that's it! I couldn't even regale to you a list of the 'candidates' for Straka's real identity, because I DON'T CARE!

Abrams doesn't understand plot progression and dramatic conclusion. LOST was exactly the same. Throughout S. he have hints at this and that, the Santorini-Man or the fucking monkey. These may as well be rattling smoke or a sodding polar bear! Abrams (and by association here Dorst) is an expert of presenting this potentially fascinating occurrences, and then having either: a) an explanation so banal and so mundane as to be offensive, or; b) no explanation at all. No conclusion. And if we're being given a 'make your own mind up' ending here, then your job is to entertain us suitably with engaging prose and interesting characters so that were even vaguely give a shit about what we feel the real ending is! Dorst and Abrams fail in cataclysmic fashion on this front.

I understand that there are challenges to delivering this kind of multi-layers narrative, I just contend that - while the idea might have been interesting - the delivery is utter tripe; and if a mere human had presented such a proposal to a publisher instead of JJ Abrams, they'd have been told to get a day job.

It is a damning indictment that, by the time I was 100 pages from the end, I couldn't wait to finish the book so I didn't have to ever pick it up again. I suspect I will destroy it, for while the creators and writers might think it is a loveletter to the written word, in truth it is a metaphorical Social Media trolling site imploring 'the written word' to commit suicide. I hate it. A lot.

If you were ever tempted to pick this book up; DO NOT. If you want something original in the written word, pick up Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts instead, it delivers in every single area that Dorst and Abrams fail so miserably. I am sure there are plenty who will disagree with me about S.; and happily it is the case that my opinion can't actually be wrong...by definition. So I still don't care.