The Hotel Avocado

Welcome to the Hotel Avocado, such a lovely book; is something The Eagles might have said, had they known Bob Mortimer was writing again.

When I reviewed The Satsuma Complex I came to it braced for disappointment and left it grinning like an idiot, having been thoroughly disarmed by a debut that had no business being as good as it was. So I arrive at its sequel, The Hotel Avocado, with a rather different problem.

The guard is down. The affection is unguarded and total. And there is no peril in publishing quite so reliable as the second book by an author whose first one charmed the socks off you, because the thing you fell for the first time was, in part, the surprise itself, and surprise is the one ingredient a sequel cannot, by definition, supply. As an author, having finished your first novel means your second proves whether you really have the chops or had luck enough to pull a fast one.

Bob Mortimer has said this follow-up was unplanned, that having finished his debut, he simply found himself wondering what became of these people, and that wondering turned into another four hundred-odd pages. You can feel that origin in the book. This is a novel written by a man who missed his own characters and wanted to spend more time with them, and there is something genuinely lovely about that impulse.

For the uninitiated, and Mortimer goes to characteristic lengths to insist you need not have read the first book, and I completely agree you don't have to, but I would gently suggest you do.

Gary Thorn returns as the anxious, lonely, almost pathologically polite legal assistant who narrated The Satsuma Complex into so many readers' hearts. A few months on from the chaos of the first book, Gary is still in Peckham, still in the tired grey suit, still being quietly undermined at the firm. The corrupt coppers he helped expose are heading to trial, and Gary is due to give evidence. His girlfriend Emily, the woman he once knew only as Satsuma, has inherited a hotel in Brighton from her late father and decamped there to drag it back to life. And so the central tension of the book is established, and it is, deliciously, the least thriller-ish tension imaginable: should Gary move to Brighton or not? Should he commit, finally, to a life, or should he keep being what the novel cheerfully and repeatedly calls a "shithouse" and stay where it is safe?

This is the part I want to praise without reservation, because it is the part that justifies the whole enterprise. Gary's paralysis is beautifully observed. Mortimer understands how a certain kind of person can be loved, can be wanted, can have the better life sitting right there waiting for them, and still find a hundred reasons to remain, occasionally just out of sheer terror of disappointing anybody.

The pull between Brighton and Peckham is really the pull between Emily and Grace, between the future and the familiar, and the book is at its warmest and most truthful whenever it sits in that ache. Grace, the splendidly cantankerous neighbour, is back, as is her sheepdog Lassoo, and the friendship between her and Gary remains, for my money, the emotional engine of these books. Whether Grace actually wants Gary to go, or only says she does, is one of the quietly devastating little questions the novel keeps turning over.

The plot, such as it is, arrives in the bequiffed and vape-wreathed form of Mr Sequence, a soft-spoken heavy who would very much prefer that Gary did not testify, and who sets about ensuring it. As menacing villains go, he is enjoyable enough, delivered in that Mortimer register where genuine threat keeps being undercut by daftness, and Brighton offers itself up as a plausible bolthole while the trouble blows over. Around this spine cluster several subplots: Emily's increasingly fraught campaign to secure planning permission for an enormous fibreglass avocado to mount outside the hotel; a new colleague at Gary's office taking an inconvenient interest in him; and his pub mate Andy constructing a bunker against the coming apocalypse. I confess the bunker made me laugh more than anything strictly load-bearing in the story did.

As you sometimes get from a debut, The Satsuma Complex had an urgency to it that pulled you through the whimsy. This one does not quite have that level of energy. Weighing in at an impressive four hundred and something pages, it is a third longer than its predecessor while carrying noticeably less plot, and you can feel that extra weight. Mortimer loves, as he always has, to jam the gears of the narrative so his characters can spend two pages litigating the relative merits of Battenberg cake or arguing about coffee. On television, in three-minute bursts, this digressive instinct is the whole joy of him. Sustained across a novel that already has somewhere it needs to be, it sometimes feels a little like it's stuck with a wheel in the mud and needs a push to get back on track. There were stretches where I was enjoying the company enormously and yet could not have told you what, if anything, was actually at stake. That last part is important, though and should not be understated. If you are enjoying it, then where is the rush, right?

The squirrels that divided readers of the first book are back (thankfully), now joined by a pigeon, so the talking-animal conceit is not retired but expanded. I will not spoil the particulars, but the book quite literally hands a chunk of its closing explanations to the bird, who arrives near the end to tidy away the loose threads Mortimer could not be bothered to resolve ordinarily, signing off with a gag about posting your complaints to the harbour master. It is the single most Bob Mortimer thing in the book, and your reaction to it will tell you everything about whether these novels are for you.

There is a persistent sense throughout, as one sharp reviewer put it, that you are being gently and tenderly made fun of, that Mortimer never quite inhabits his characters so much as stands just behind them doing a bit. That was true of the first book too; the difference is that its momentum gave you less time to notice.

What carries all of this is the prose and the sheer disarming likeability of the whole undertaking. Nobody else writes sentences with quite this rhythm, the faintly faulty logic followed by the swerve into the absurd, the similes that should not work and somehow land perfectly. The good guys, at one point, charge into battle shouting "Viva tomatoes!", and the bad guys, when shot, yelp that it hurts ever so badly, and I am simply not made of the sort of stern stuff that can resist that. It is whimsical without being twee, silly without being slight, exactly as before. It is also, in its quieter moments, genuinely moving on the subject of loneliness and the terror of choosing a life, which remains the thing Mortimer writes about better than the crime caper he hangs it on.

So where does that leave us? The Hotel Avocado is a baggier, gentler, less propulsive book than The Satsuma Complex, a sequel that trades urgency for the pleasure of returning to people you have come to love, and whether that is a fair trade depends entirely on what you came for. If you want a tightly sprung thriller, you will be frustrated, but then again, it also means you haven't been paying attention, because the first one wasn't either. The reliance on a pigeon to do the work a plot ought to do will feel, depending on your temperament, like either a delightful raspberry blown at the conventions of the form or simply an author getting away with it.

It did become a number one Sunday Times bestseller and was named by Waterstones among the best crime and thriller titles of 2024, which is funny, because crime and thriller are precisely the things it cares about least.

I will not pretend it is the equal of the book that came before it. But I spent its four hundred pages in the company of Gary and Grace and was very glad to be there, I laughed out loud more than once, and I closed it with the same grin The Satsuma Complex put on my face, only slightly more crooked. If you loved the first one, you already know whether you are going to read this, and you already know you are going to love it.