'The Rock Pool' is a heavy going satire about a man with high expectations which are slowly shattered as he drifts through Cannes and Nice, meeting the locals and being swindled by them almost as quickly. Connolly's writing does not excite me or interest me, I have no emotional connection to any of his characters and found the prose was too dreamlike to appreciate. I do not understand writers who start off a paragraph normally, then suddenly descend into poetic madness without warning. We as readers are supposed to view this as 'clever'. This unfortunately is how Connolly's mind works. No doubt I am missing some fascinating insight into this well known critic/writer's psyche, but this doesn't mean I have to agree with the text in front of me. And I don't. This novel tries too hard to be something deeper than it is, and it shows.
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