This should have been to my liking,small English town setting ,an obsession with an author and praise of post offices....
But no ,none of characters lived for me and it was bit silly or dull all the way.
Micheal P voice and reading were good but could not make it worthwhile... ( )

Amiable, inoffensive and light rather than funny, Hemingway's Chair, the first novel by Michael Palin, had a 3-star rating written all over it. But the book has a few surprises up its sleeve, and it took me on a bit of a journey before I ultimately rested on that 3-star rating. As a fan of Ernest Hemingway myself, I was already sold on the story of Martin, a mild-mannered everyman who works at a post office and is an aficionado of 'Papa'. He reads the stories, memorises the trivia and collects the memorabilia, including the titular 'Hemingway's chair'. Martin is "unspectacular" but "careful and thorough and conscientious and demanded little of others" (pg. 28), and when his post office is taken over by a slick, 'modernizing' manager – who wants to tear out the heart of the community to deploy "the Proactive Selling Technique to maximise customer potential" (pg. 170), among other godawful things – Martin decides to look to his larger-than-life literary hero for guidance.

Once the Hemingway itch was scratched, I found myself surprisingly engaged by Palin's story. The characters are all well-drawn; Martin's character development over the course of the novel is particularly deft. The coastal town of Theston is portrayed as warm and provincial, like a slightly offbeat episode of Emmerdale, and the threats of privatization, foreign takeovers and business-over-community priorities speak to the sort of painful, desperate decline that will be familiar to many English towns. The book is heartfelt and doesn't shy away from the human element: the dignified, ageing post office worker who had "once been taught to strip down a machine gun blindfold" yet is now trying to laugh off his inability to learn computers (pg. 87), and the other worker who is let go to 'make economies' and comes in days later to sign on the dole (pg. 74). Just the worthless, forgotten emissions of a spluttering British engine that abandoned its courage decades ago.

The book is quietly impressive in this respect, even if it's not the book you would expect. As I said, it's light rather than comic, and there's something warm about returning to the Nineties (Palin wrote the book in 1995), when the 'management seminars' and 'role-play' stuff (pg. 11) could be laughed off and a salary of £11,500 per year could pay a mortgage (pg. 133). Hemingway's Chair is a book that should be cherished, because if you tried to write it today it would necessarily be a much more brutal book.

Indeed, such a surprise was Hemingway's Chair that it was inching towards a 4-star rating from me, despite its innate 3-star-ness. Unfortunately, the final third of the book became rather strange and hasty, with the ending unexpectedly bleak. For such an unassuming and compassionate book, it was difficult to lurch towards where Palin takes it. But ultimately, though Hemingway and rural England are strange bedfellows, as one character acknowledges (pg. 54), the result is rather unique and successful. Hemingway's Chair is nice to read for what it is, but it's not what you would think it is. ( )

Martin Sproal's obsession with Hemingway leads him into a series of activities worthy of his idol. ( )

A Michael Palin novel should be a wonder of the modern world, filled with belly laughs aplenty. So, "Hemingway's Chair" is quite the disappointment.

The protagonist Martin is a staid post office worker in a small English town opposed to the new post office manager and what he has planned for the post office. Martin is also a mad keen Ernest Hemingway fan and collects everything he can of the man and his work. He gets up to all manner of minor levels of shenanigans trying to save the post office and gets not one but two women and Hemingway's Chair. The biggest issue with "Hemingway's Chair" though is the lead character, for whom I could find no sympathy for, and was astonished at his success with the ladies. ( )

Quite decent. ( )