Amusingly silly ... Sleet’s corporate skulduggery in the obscure world of high finance... is excessively convoluted ... Rothschild has great fun pushing her grotesquerie to the limits ... But you can’t create a world of such knowing two dimensionality while simultaneously demanding the reader invest in it. This novel should be as satisfying as whipped cream. Instead it’s surprisingly hard work.
Rothschild writes with great esprit, hurling jokes on to the page ... It’s hard not to feel that the novel has been influenced by Succession ... However, while the humour in the television show lurks subtly beneath a dark façade, Rothschild’s is all on the surface which, as the novel progresses, can become a little exhausting ... High Time is a lot of fun, and it did make me laugh, but when the merriment ends, one does want to be left with more to think about than the lifestyles of the rich and ghastly.
With scenes that are over-the-top hilarious and a sharply satiric view of late-stage capitalism, this plays like a savvy cross between Brideshead Revisited and Succession as written by the Monty Python troupe.
Insecure, status-seeking Sleet is a monster painted with such broad strokes he might as well have a mustache to twirl, and the rest of Rothschild’s characterizations are equally clichéd ... To give Rothschild her due, she crafts an enjoyably complicated narrative ... The abundance of machinations by a horde of not especially memorable characters, however, makes it likely that little of it will be remembered once the last chapter is finished.
