Criminal Class

I like the story, Liam.

I think that what could make it better would be stretching it out, making it a longer story. The plot is unique and intricate, and I like your description of Taraz and Burana. Maybe I'm thinking stretching out a few of the narrative parts into scenes, to pace it down a little. You have a lot there, a lot of room to create closer narrative spaces.

Great story. Hope my comments help.

Liam

This is great satire, very funny, and almost believable. I really enjoyed this. The only word that stood out was 'klicks', which seemed a bit Hollywood for a British diplomat. Perhaps 'miles' would work better. Cracking story though.

I really love how this one comes arround full circle. Especially love the final lines. Supurb.

The dry humor is pitch perfect. I agree with Devin that you could show a little more, especially in the scene with Vaskia.

I only noticed one or two grammar errors which seem to have been addressed above. I hate that I can't be more helpful on this one, so I guess I'll just say I really enjoyed this, and don't feel it needs too much work. If anything, since you said this was longer than you are used to writing you may be able to take an eagle eye to it to see if you can find any extraneous words and cut it down until it's even sharper than it already is. Anyway, Kudos. Good Luck.

--JR--

"Criminal" - loved it! Quirky way of starting a story.

Guess I'm with others here, narrator is a bit too passive, (things happen to him, his successes and failures are about what other people have done) but a fun ride nonetheless.

Liam,

I enjoyed this piece.  It seems to be one of the best thought out or researched crimes in the contest (of the 20 or 30 I've read).  I'm good with the passice MC.  I generally prefer more conversation to keep a story moving, but your environment and character's experience through the environment was more the focus of this piece, so chatting would likely have hurt what you were getting at.  There are a few references that I didn't get, but I got enough of them that the ones I missed didn't hang me up.  Nice work.

Hi Liam,

I really enjoyed this - especially the ending. I love it when you get a story which gos full circle, and it's and ironic and very satisfying finish to it.

I thought that there were a few places where the language could be tidied up a little, but it was generally an easy piece to read There are a couple of things I thought could be explained a little better.

I thought that maybe convincing the UK government to house prisoners in Kasakhstan was a little too easy, although going into this more would probably require a longer word limit.

I loved the concept of the ending, but wanted a little more. The narrator seemed to take it all remarkably well! I also found it difficult to believe that Sergei hadn't set him up with the contents of his suitcase. Surely Sergei was smarter than this! I thought that once Sergei had got his password, then the narrator is no longer useful to him so he had him set up. So I guess I just needed a little more clarity on who was the most naieve one - Sergei or the main character!

Overall - a very enjoyable story, with an intriguing plot, great humour and a nice roundness to it. Nice job!

Matty

Hi Liam,

Read your story. I would have to say in terms of pure writing style it is one of the best stories I have read in this competition. It's quite well crafted and very detailed. Yet your writing style is skillful enough where all the little details don't become an info dump. This just seems to be on a  higher level then alot of the other stuff posted here. If I came across a novel you wrote, I would buy it. 

Having said that, it wasnt perfect (what is?). There were a few typos, one that I remember is page 3, third last line "piss off". There might be a few others like that, but I dont remember at the moment.

Another thing that could have been better was more back and forth dialog between characters to change up the pace, but that's my personal preference. 

Oh, and if you could read my story and leave a critique I'd really appreciate it. I read on the "pimp your..." thread that you consider yourself a harsh reviewer. Well I've braced myself for that. So, lets do this. **closes eyes and turns away**

Que sera sera

Liam,

I hope admin dont rebuke me for the following comment but I found this piece fucking funny! I particularly like the stiff upper lip approach, it is reminiscent of quality British comedy, the narration reminded me of a Ripping Yarns episode called Tompkison's School Days (which is a favourite of mine) and there are echoes of Yes, Minister. Sorry to give tv show comparisons but I can't think of any authors that use comedy like this other than Pratchett or Holt, and your voice is different to theirs.

I honestly can't think of anything constructive or negative to say in critique (there are some bits where you've repeated words but it works with the rhythm), for me this piece reads so well.

Good luck with the contest.

And if the humour wasn't intentional I hope I haven't offended you.

All the best

Mads

Great control of language. You packed a lot of information into a comparatively small amount of words and were still able to fully develop the plot and characters. I agree with everyone that you seem to know a lot about what you're writing about, whether that comes from personal interest/knowledge or from extensive research, well done.

I quite enjoyed this story, thumbs up from me. The wry humor, the attention to detail, it really worked. I felt like you were familiar with the country you wrote about, and the inner political workings between it and the UK. I don't know how much research you did, or if most of it was made up, but either way, it was written with authority. The situation felt real, and very plausible.

Honestly, I'm having a hard time coming up with criticisms. Pretty much everything that happens it told to us, but to me that is inherent to the nature of the story. It is told through the eyes of the main character. So I don't know how much "show, don't tell" applies here.

I also feel like we get more depth from the country than the main character. He is kind of this naive guy, but other than that, I couldn't tell you much about him. I also feel there isn't really much conflict, as he is not aware until the end of what is happening to him. Some attention in these areas could only help an otherwise well-written story, although it's a short one, so I don't think you need to add too much.

Other than that, the writing is polished, the setting is unique, and the tone is spot on. Good stuff. I hope you find some of this helpful in making it even better. Good luck out there.

This is a story I enjoyed reading just for the writing style - to the point where it was irrelevant what was happening, I just enjoyed hearing the narrator's voice. You've got a really strong command of language. This reminds me of Jonathan Franzen's Twenty-Seventh City a bit. I'm actually shocked you had to work to get this to 3000 words because there's so much info packed in there. Good job.

Hey Liam, I suck at reviewing so sorry if this is short. First, I thought the writing was good. I didn't see any typos or clunky sentences or things that didn't make any sense. Everything was tight. My problem was the story itself. I thought it was brutally dull. Full of exposition with a severe lack of dialogue, and nothing ever really happened. Sorry to sound so harsh but I just don't think it's my type of story is all. 

I think if you replace some of the expanatory aspects of the story, the parts where the main character is telling the reader what happened, with dialogue and more interaction between characters, it'll be less tedious on the reader. This is an example of what I mean. It's just a long expository paragraph without much dialogue. You kind of do this throughout. I would suggest chopping it up a little to speed the story up. 

Occasionally, Sergei drew me aside to talk business. On a shooting range an hour from the Capital, he wanted to know how the policy of relocating prisoners was going down back in the UK, and who the main opponents were. As he blasted another target to confetti (Sergei preferred high calibre weapons, anything less than an AK47 was, he said, a lady’s gun) he joked that perhaps he – or rather, Vaskia and her even more spectacular friends – could win them over, and I agreed, whilst wriggling a finger in my stilling ringing ear, though joking back that he’d need boys just as pretty for his main opponent, the shadow foreign minister. He nodded, thoughtfully as he handed me a loaded shotgun. That was before the press got wind of the story, of course. No-one ever knew who leaked the surprisingly high quality digital photos. In the end, all the charges were dropped, probably as much because it was beginning to look like a homophobic witch hunt as the doubt over the credibility of the evidence, but by then the shadow foreign minister had resigned, the usual “not wanting this to be a distraction” excuse while the leader of the opposition distanced himself from anything that might sully their ‘family values’ stance. It was fortunate indeed for Sergei that the not quite-so-honourable member for Basingstoke’s replacement was more keen on fostering UK/US relations than squabbling over pro or anti European sentiment, and if anything, actually supported the extension of the use of Burana for middle to lower level criminals as well, despite being on the wrong side of the House. Though what a Jaguar-driving champagne-swigging Saville-row suit wearing MP was doing on the Labour front benches was always a bit of a mystery to me. Apparently he’d come into a considerable sum of money - family inheritance, or some such. Truth was, I had other concerns as the scandal played out, such as counting the bricks in the basement cell wall at New Scotland Yard and stealing myself for the next interrogation, so maybe I wasn’t quite so au fait with all that was going on in Whitehall as I should have been at the time.

Overall, the story was a bit uninteresting for me, but the writing was good enough that it deserved a thumbs up.

Liam-

Your story feels like it has much larger legs than space of a 10 page short story. Do you envision this as something longer?
The story itself needs more room to dramatize the events your narrator is explaining. We move from one thing to the next, I never got much of sense of a plot. I know that our main character is a naïve diplomat who gets easily manipulated and framed, but his journey is more exposition heavy than actually dramatized events.

Like the meeting with Sergei, for example, it would better serve the story to have the back and forth negotiations play out so that we can get a sense of the characters and the stakes at hand. Presumably, your main character has some skills to be in his position, exploring more of the nuances of this deal will allow him to be outwitted and not just an out right fool as he comes off. I’m thinking of how Armando Iannucci shows us the foolish and occasional competent sides of his characters in political power.

I do like the narrator’s voice and the tone that you’ve established. You’ve got an interesting set up, like I’ve repeated, you really just need to give yourself the space to explore the scenes more deeply to set up the drama. 

Best, 

Tim 

Liam,

Really great story.  First and foremost, I love the flow of your writing.  It clicks along very nicely, and has a sort of poetic quality to it - something I think many undervalue.  When the words themselves are so pleasant to read, it allows all the details to just seep in almost without thought and creates a truly immersive experience.

In terms of the story itself, I think you unfolded everything well.  Glancing at previous comments, it seems some might have had an issue with the expositional nature of the story, but that didn't hinder anything for me, because I think your story structure and the way you presented everything was just so well done.  I still didn't realize where the story was going until I was reaching the end and you began to reveal why he was a prisoner.  Hell, at one point I forgot he was a prisoner until you brought it back to that.

I only have one piece of criticism, but it's something minor, regarding the transition in the beginning between the character as a prisoner and the character as a government official.  On one hand you carefully, and skillfully, made the transition between the two.  It was very smooth.  However, I wasn't totally clear at first that the transition occured.  As I read, I had to stop for a moment and get my bearings straight.  A quick re-read of two the preceeding paragraphs sorted it out for me, so it didn't totally knock me off the rails or detract from the story.  Reading it through yet again, it's even more obvious to me what was happening, but I think my initial confusion came from describing the flight.  I wasn't sure if we were seeing the character as a prisoner or an official, because he spoke about both the business trip and his prison sentence.  I don't think anything drastic needs to be done to remedy this - maybe include a more specific detail regarding the time frame.  For instance, "So government business was the reason for my first trip, X years earlier" or something to that effect.  But it's your story and you know better than I do how to best make that adjustment it if you choose to do so.  Of course, my confusion with this could be a me-thing rather than a story issue.  Perhaps it was perfectly clear to other readers.

I know I spent more time in this review talking about one minor critique than I did the positive stuff (everything else, essentially), but I always want to be as clear as possible if I'm going to point out something I saw as a negative.  Overall, I thought this was excellently written and structured.  I don't understand how you don't have a higher upvote percentage.  I've seen stories get upvoted during this contest solely on the fact that it had potential, even though the reviewers themselves said it was nowhere near good/finished (one of the consequences of a workshop/contest hybrid, perhaps), so it's a shame to see something like this be so underrated.  Great work. 

Thanks for the read.

Josh

Hey Liam,

This wasn't a bad story, but I have a hard time liking it.  There's some good comedy in there and some great descriptions.  However, I found myself wondering when the story proper was gonna start.  You spend the first two-and-a-half pages describing the country, which is good, but it might be a little too much and a bit repetitive.  And then I finally feel like the narrative is going somewhere only for it devolve into quick flashes of debauchery and I never felt like that was going to be the endgame.  I felt like that was a means to an end.  I'd have like to see more clearly defined moments as opposed to the montage style you have here.  Although I did love the irony of the MC being sent to a prison he helped establish as an overflow destination.

Overall I can't dislike it.  It takes a lot for me to downvote and this was too well written for that.  This is a thumbs up for style and the hope that some more substance is injected later.

Damon Lytton