Arena

Reading Group review. We felt this was not the author's best or most engaging. Nevertheless, when we settled down to discuss it, we all had plenty of comments and opinions, and it turned out not to have been such a bad read after all! The style of the book was visual in its descriptions, easy to read, and the chapters mercifully short, but the range of characters was large, and the twists and turns of the story as the met and re-met in different guises were thought-provoking. It was humorous and a few people had laughed out loud, but several people felt it petered out two-thirds of the way through. We appreciated the social history element and the irony in the tale, which was perceptive re the attitudes of the time. The detailed knowledge of world of finance and 'Get rich quick' ideas was a bit over most people's heads.