"When you think they're all laughing at you, you're in serious trouble. Because either they are all laughing at you, or you're going mad."

Tyndale Corbett is a professional failure. Things have got to change and when he finds himself in Miami under an assumed identity he hatches his plan.

He will pretend to be a new man.

He will be God.

"Religion never has to deliver, it only has to promise to deliver."

Good to be God is a strange fish. I wanted to love it. I really did. It's a good book, but ... damn it, I'm going to take some advice from the book:

"Politeness is what happens when you're figuring out people's value."

Okay there is value to giving a glowing account of this book, it would stand my magazine in good stead with Alma Books. I like Alma Books they publish Tom McCarthy. But in the end the value of a honest review is higher. So I will switch of my polite filter and be honest. In a constructive way you understand.

"I think I was right; but I've noticed that being right doesn't do you much good. Being right doesn't improve the quality of your life."

There you go. There is an example of what is good with the book and what is bad. The book is stuffed full of witty clever asides. Here's another one:

"One of the great shortcomings of life is the lack of captions, that there is no punctuation, no musical sting to warn you when something important is happening."

But the problem is the story. It felt that the story was a bit embarrassed by itself - O let's get that bit over quickly shall we - and there is no literary prose to hide that. Just the clever - and they are very clever - comments on life. But that's not enough. There was no emotional involvement. I enjoyed reading it, but I didn't care. I'd rather have them condensed into a small book which I can leave in the loo for people to read.

So there we go - an author that has bucket loads of insights into human behaviour struggling to find a canvas to paint on.

You know what? I'm going to read his first novel, Under the Frog. I have a sneaking suspicion that I may adjust my view of Tibor after that.