Sex and violence: "Misspent Youth" by Peter Hamilton

Amazon link

Call me a Hamilton completist .. .

Misspent Youth was possibly Hamilton's most-panned novel. Here's David Langford's review for Amazon.

"Peter Hamilton is famed for SF blockbusters of far-future interstellar adventure. By contrast Misspent Youth is a social comedy set in the year 2040 in England. When gene therapy rewinds Jeff Baker's age back to his early 20s he finds that wisdom and experience are no match for hormones...

The rejuvenation treatment, developed by federal Europe to impress laggard America, is so complex and expensive that only one person every 18 months can receive it. Jeff is the first because he's a celebrity inventor, father of the "datasphere" which superseded the Internet.

Family upheavals follow. An "arrangement" with his much younger, still beautiful wife Sue lets her enjoy lovers while the aged Jeff turns a blind eye: now things are different. Meanwhile their 18-year-old son Tim is struggling ineptly with teenage sexual pangs and the impossibility of understanding girls. All part of growing up, but Jeff's renewed youth brings farcical complications.

It's not just that Jeff now fancies Sue again. He can't resist even younger women. An early one-night stand is publicised all over the datasphere. Embarrassment escalates when he's seduced by the granddaughter of a long-time pub companion. Worse, several of Tim's ravishing female schoolmates are interested in Jeff the celebrity stud. The dishiest of all is Tim's latest, most hopelessly adoring girlfriend.

Can it be coincidence that the action mostly happens in Rutland?

This comedy of embarrassments and revelations has a darker background: Europe is plagued by separatist movements whose terrorist habits make the old IRA look like pussycats. The turning point in Jeff's tangled relationships comes when he attends a London conference surrounded by protest that breeds riot -- with Tim among the protesters.

A foreshadowed twist leads to a finale that mixes cynicism with sentiment. En route Misspent Youth is a lot of fun."

It's hard writing about sex. The chasms of the bad sex award and suspicions of self-gratifying wish-fulfillment are never far away. When an old man in a rejuvenated body is graphically described as having hot sex with hot teens, the ghost of paedophilia can't be far behind.

I suppose the bad reviews were to be expected.

It's customary for reviewers to write in the author's defence that the sex scenes were 'not arousing' - artistic sensibilities positively call for such a judgement. I would probably concur: Hamilton is good at writing about sex - the reader does not curdle with the embarrassing sensation that they have stumbled into a p**n novel - the writing really doesn't put hairs on your chest.

It seems to me that Hamilton is, however, more interested in two other things: firstly the experience of being a teenager, where personal relationships are always fraught with raw, emotional turbulence and one is always out of one's depth; and secondly the politics of the European Union (he is not a fan). In 2018, the regime-shaking Euro-angst conjured up in this 2009 novel seems more relevant than ever.

No, my critique of this novel is that - competent writer though he is - the miniature scale of the setting and plot makes much of the writing rather tedious.