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Dog Days is to computers what
Fever Pitch is to football. Its an
excellent debut novel written for
the geek-chic generation, mixing
slacker comedy with an
enthusiastic frenzy of computer
industry name-checking.
The heroes of Dog Days are
Reilly and Evan, a pair of Trekkie
programmers living in the run-down
Italian neighbourhood
of Bostons North End. They are
working for a large software
house, developing an
e-commerce application which is
running way behind schedule
and way over budget. They play
Quake on the office network, visit
Microsoft to be mocked by their
engineers, discuss the new
American Dream of finding the
venture capital for their own
Internet start-up, suffer agonies
over the love of good (and bad)
women, and kidnap a champion
greyhound from the local Mafia
kingpin.
Lyons artfully blends IT sector
office politics with demented
comedy to great effect. The play
between the personal lives and
professional careers of the
characters may be pure
Coupeland, but their descent
from out-of-their-depth code-bashers
to way out-of-their-depth
dognappers on the run from the
Mob is a glorious absurdism that
Coupelands Gap - wearing
Microserfs would be too boring
to manage, however much you
might wish it upon them.
Lyons
himself never gets out of his
depth; his prose is as convincing
when he tries to portray the
grace and power of Coco, the
champion greyhound, as when
he is writing about Reillys pain at losing the woman of his
dreams to an up-and-coming
VP, or his morbid lack of faith
in his own ability to write
device drivers.
Between the crisp
observations of desks strewn
with printout, empty cans of Jolt
Cola and picture of Jobs as
Satan, and the high farce of the
run-in with the mob, Lyons gets
away with a surprisingly old-fashioned
love story. Reillys
uncaring glamorous girlfriend
versus caring girl-next-door love
interest would be trite if you ever
really had time to worry about it,
but you dont. After all, hes so
good at getting himself in every
other kind of mess that you can
believe that hed be blind to a plot
device as standard as that, too.
Dog Days is a fast paced and
wickedly funny novel that
manages to be an extremely well
researched story about the IT
industry too - if there was ever a
book to read whilst sipping café
lattes in a cybercafe, this is it.
Highly recommended.
Originally reviewed in issue 6
by Andrew Korn.
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