The Stars' Tennis Balls

by Stephen Fry

Ned Maddstone has the world at his feet. Handsome, charming, popular and talented, his life is progressing smoothly, effortlessly, happily.

But an unfortunate confrontation with a boy in his school results in a prank that goes badly wrong and suddenly he's incarcerated - without chance of release. So begins a year-long process of torment and hopelessness, which will destroy his very identity, until almost nothing remains of him but this unquenchable desire for revenge.

'Whatever Stephen Fry does, he has it - that rare, unlearnable quality. When he speaks you listen. When he writes, you read' Literary Review

'Keeps you simultaneously gripped and chuckling throughout' Later

• ISBN10: 0099471558
• ISBN13: 9780099471554
• Publish Date: 5 August 2004 (first published 28 September 2000)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Cornerstone
• Imprint: Arrow Books Ltd
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 448
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

It took me quite a while to get into the story, but having gotten past the first part which reads like an excerpt from Moab, I could not put it down. I had - on purpose - not read any reviews for this book, and am now glad about that as most reviews only make the comparison to The Count of Monte Christo.

What about the resonances of other works, though? I couldn't help but also be reminded of Zweig's Chess Story, Duerrenmatt's Physicists, The Bourne Identity, and Pulp Fiction. All in all I was reminded of a venerable hodge podge of dilemmas. The kind of pastiche episodes that make fab reading in any graphic novel, except of course that The Stars' Tennis Balls isn't a graphic novel.
Isn't it?
It will probably take a few days before I can make up my mind about this one.

In any case, 5 stars for gripping my imagination, for making me reconsider literary genres, for keeping me up half the night pondering about the characters, for - no doubt - sticking in my head for a long time to come.

[clq]

I'm finding it hard to pin down this book. It seems like it is trying to be quite a few things, and while it doesn't directly fail at being any of them, it struggles in getting there with all of them.

Firstly, the story is satirical. The characters in the book are clever, well-constructed caricatures. Some situations in the book are meant as obvious social commentary, and these are funny and well done. However, there aren't enough of them for this to be 400 pages of satire.
Secondly, it is a thriller. Parts of the book are genuinely exciting and thrilling, and as the story twisted and threw itself up in the air, I found myself wondering how it would be brought back down to earth. It never quite was. I rarely knew where the story would go next, but eventually everything became a little too implausible for me to really care.
Lastly, a few moral points are made. Helpfully or annoyingly, take your pick, you can rely on the characters to pretty much state the points the writer wants to get across, in case you hadn't picked them up yourself. Unfortunately, since I found myself unable to relate to anything at all happening after page 40, none of these points really made much of an impact beyond just being written down.

However, for some reason everything kind of works. I put this entirely down to Stephen Fry and his Stephen Fry'ness. This book has plenty and plenty of Stephen Fry'ness. It manages to be warm, clever and rather likable while also being dark, violent and twisted. Ultimately, I picked this book up because it was by Stephen Fry, and I figured it couldn't be that bad. And that's exactly what it was. Not great, but not that bad.