Without any feeling of shame, I can reveal that I plugged SNAPSHOT to my publishers Austin Macauley as being as a book “something akin to a male Bridget Jones”.
Although it is written as constituting more of an introspective stream of consciousness – aside from specific entries chartering exact quantity of calories ingested, cigarettes smoked and alcohol units consumed etc. – it does offer a chronologically accurate glimpse at the 27 year old protagonist Darren Brown’s inner feelings and encompassing confusions.
SNAPSHOT allows the reader to become a voyeur. Addressing the pressures encountered through a painstakingly frank account from a millennial entering a second phase of adulthood, with a growing lack of faith in a system which it had always so suited him to cooperate alongside. Nothing is at all clear-cut and there is the burning resentment towards the feeling of having being fed a myth, in so far as how to succeed in life automatically being the result of working hard. The turbulence in being forced to digest this becomes increasingly exposed.
With this comes the theme of Darren’s quest to evade the prolonging of an existence where instant gratification and the superficial have become the only tangible raisons d’etre. Everything in life proving itself to be so ambiguous amongst the antipathy in scornfully existing as one of the numerous numbers of Thatcher’s children that have seemingly been carelessly forgotten.
This book transcends gender boundaries as we enter a world where we witness the joys and confusion at these roles not being so explicitly defined. With our Darren being as likeable and sympathetic as he is flawed, we are forced to question through his search for lasting love, whether a life in which nothing can be clearly defined can breed positivity for anybody…
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