Books: The Portable Door by Tom Holt (2003)

“Starting a new job is always stressful (particularly when you don't particularly want one), but when Paul Carpenter arrives at the office of H.W. Wells he has no idea what trouble lies in store. Because he is about to discover that the apparently respectable establishment now paying his salary is in fact a front for a deeply sinister organisation that has a mighty peculiar agenda. It seems that half the time his bosses are away with the fairies. But they're not, of course. They're away with the goblins.”

I tried The Portable Door because I saw a trailer for an Australian made film version and it looked intriguing. I mean it has Oscar winner Christoph Walta, Sam Neill, and Miranda Otto in it, and, as noted, the premise looked interesting. So I got the book off of ThriftBooks and just finished it and I got to say, it’s clear the trailer for the film was taking liberties with the books plot (unless all the actors decided slumming in a low budget fantasy film looked fun). I mean, I liked the premise, a tale about an everyday man who discovers a talent for magic and gets co-opted into the office managing the surreal. But the book is bogged down in so much exposition, with a terribly uninteresting main character, who may be disillusioned about life and the fact that his parents moved to Florida to retire and did not invite Paul, but none the less is still annoying. You could say, because Holt is a British and he’s mocking, taking a satirical poke, at the youth of 2003 (when this book was released) that they have no idea how to live on their own because their parents never taught them how to survive. Still, Paul is boring and shows little to no interest or even curiosity into what he’s got himself involved in. He spends the entire book mooning over his co-worker Sophie –who also shows little interest in what is happening at this company they’ve both been hired at.

It’s quirky, yes, and it Holt appears to like juxtaposing the mundane with the fantastic, and his take on office life is fairly realistic, but it took nearly 200 pages for the “portable door” to arrive on the scene, and by then things just never gelled until last quarter of the tale. This is also the first of seven books set in this universe, but like Ordinary Monsters, I’m very doubtful I will continue on. 

The trailer for the film, to debut on April 7 on the streaming MGM+, is below. But, again, this film seems no way connected to the book.