While flying about, Erasmus also picked up another novel on which a movie he liked was based.
J.J. Connolly’s Layer Cake is a great read. It’s not the most accessible crime novel, particularly for the American reader, as it’s buried under British criminal argot and East London dialect.
The story’s unnamed narrator is a 29-year-old drug dealer whose goal is to get out of the business by the time he’s thirty. This proves more difficult than anticipated. The characterizations in the book are far better than in the movie, which struggled to contain all the plot put into it.
Connolly’s adaptation for the screen is very good, incidentally: reading the book, one realizes just how complicated a plot he had to simplify. What the movie loses in depth over the book, it gains in clarity of plot. The book is even more tangled than the film.
Connolly’s protagonist escapes the underworld in the book, though not without paying a significant and harrowing price. Also, the book ends with a nice ironic twist akin to the Ocean’s Eleven scene Erasmus cited approvingly below.
If you liked the movie and are up for a challenging read, Layer Cake will repay. If you’re put off by the language, Erasmus might suggest watching the film first, as a sort of crib note, to get the plot right in your head before returning into the book.
Layer Cake, liber, placet.
