Comedians can craft funny novels and The Satsuma Complex, by British personality Bob Mortimer, tries its hardest, with modest success. The plotline comes straight from Haruki Murakami. A meek, detail-minded thirty-year-old legal assistant becomes plunged into a dangerous mystery, laced with the prospect of love at last, when he meets a colleague in a bar but also an enigmatic woman bearing a book called The Satsuma Complex. The colleague goes missing, our hero seeks the girl, and events corkscrew toward catastrophe. Gary, our hero, is an engaging protagonist, perhaps over-described, and the plot almost works. Billed as “brilliantly funny,” it comes across instead as worthy of a mild gag-rendered chuckle now and again. Overall, The Satsuma Complex makes for a pleasant enough read but fails to excite with either plot, characters, or language.
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