Review of A Dirty Job . . . Posted September 26, 2007

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore Orbit, 2006 Reviewed by Jason Fischer Book reviews index

In A Dirty Job, we meet Charlie Asher, a self-proclaimed Beta Male and fairly non-descript individual. The proprietor of a second-hand store, he finds himself drawn into the world of the supernatural when he finds a tall stranger standing over his recently deceased wife. A tall stranger who he shouldn't be allowed to see, but can. By a process unknown to anyone, Charlie Asher is chosen to become Death. Or more specifically, a Death Merchant.

The gist of this job is that souls are trapped in the belongings of the recently deceased, and must be retrieved by select individuals before dark forces can use the trapped soul for evil means. Naturally enough, the people best suited to retrieving soul vessels are those dealing with deceased estates and secondhand goods.

Writing about the personification of Death is no easy task. Such a grim topic lends itself to humour, but often the path to humour is littered with tired clichés. It is hard to measure up to the efforts of humourists such as Pratchett who have already covered this theme. While Moore has attempted to put his own spin on a worn trope, it misfires in places.

There is some good humour in this work, and one or two laugh out loud moments. The pairing of a character like Charlie with his macabre task is ludicrous and Moore has picked a great juxtaposition for his protagonist. There is a lot of empathy generated for Charlie, a single-parent widower with a gruesome task and no guidance. The whole situation reads like something from the brain of Nick Hornby, although some of the characters are ciphers and verge on cliché.

A Dirty Job promises a lot but doesn't quite hit the mark. There are significant problems with pacing, and events jump forward months and years for no apparent reason. The forces of darkness simply appear to twiddle their thumbs while the protagonist's daughter grows up. She has some relevance to the conclusion but this has been handled awkwardly and shows.

The supernatural element is confusing, and the rules for how death works and what happens to souls is difficult and inconsistent. Some of these concepts do nothing to add to the humour or advance the story. There has obviously been a great deal of research into dying and the mythology of death, but too much of this has found its way into the speculative side of this novel. This info-dumping is a little frustrating and jars the narrative flow.

The use of San Francisco as a setting is thorough, but suffers from the same issues as above. While it is authentic and there is no doubt the author knows what he is talking about, for my mind there are many references and sly in-jokes that do nothing to advance the piece.

In A Dirty Job, Moore presents a good intention smothered by flawed concepts and too many red herrings. Perhaps his other humorous pieces work better than this one does because Moore does have a rollicking tale-telling style and a great sense of humour, evident in the book. However this novel comes across as rushed, which is a shame because this story could have been so much more.

Reviewed by Jason Fischer