The CRAZIEST BOOK I've ever read!! Supposedly it's true, but it's so unbelievably weird with plenty to laugh about!!

It's been a long while since I read such a delightful book. Yes, delightful. The interaction between the two main characters could be the setting for a Grumpy Old Men movie! Their disagreements on the facts will cause you to laugh out loud. I'm telling everyone I know to read this book!

British Comedy?

With the sangfroid of a Monty Python skit, ludicrousity builds on farce with the amusement style of public school/middle school boys. Physical and scatological humor abound; silliness reigns. This will not be everyone's cup of tea but Three Stooges and Benny Hill fans will likely approve resoundingly! Not for the squeamish.

What absurd adventures the Majors had! Impossible but delightful. Thanks to Farrago and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

This book is a little crazy, a little awful and a lot of fun - but what else to expect from Farrago book.. One just can't put it down, whilst shaking ones head. Probably not a book for the PC crowd, very "tongue in cheek"
Written in a series of letters as published memoires between two friends? enemies or are they just jealous of each other?
The adventures are tantalising, funny and very crazy, for some reason it brings to my mind the steam punk era.
I really enjoyed it and look forward to the sequel

Very Blackadderish, my own feeling, however, is that that type of thing does not come across so well in the written as opposed to the visual medium. It also aims at the Flashman market, and other reviews equate the two. Flashman, however, I find wholly believable. The two Scoundrels, on the other hand, seem more like caricatures of their supposed literary ancestor.
So, amusing enough, but the parodic, over the top, "alt-history" episodes don't ring true except as a kind of comic book reality. It would probably work well on radio where disbelief is more easily suspended.

I found Scoundrels amusing but not quite as hilarious as some other reviewers did.

It purports to be the memoirs of a couple of upper crust chaps, now long retired, who have had all sorts of outrageous adventures and who, in between chapters of reminiscence, snipe at each other very amusingly. It’s well written and quite outrageous; they are self-seeking, brutal and uncaring with a casual, blind arrogance which far outstrips any abilities they may have. The scrapes they get into are absurd and often entertainingly disgusting (Cornwall’s recovery from fugu poisoning is quite appalling, for example).

How funny you find this will depend on your sense of humour, but it’s well done (in a field which has some terrible turkeys in it). I find it quite entertaining; I read it in smallish chunks, but I do keep going back for more and I will certainly read any subsequent volumes.

(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)

The premise of the book is that the publishers have been legally obliged to issue this book, despite their misgivings about its literary, moral and commercial merit. This is a book written with a tongue so firmly in someone's cheek that it could poke out of their ear.

The benefit of Amazon’s Look Inside feature is that you can read the first few pages of a book and decide whether it has merit. The presumption is that the author works very hard on those initial pages, attempting to hook the reader. One might surmise that the beginning may be the best part of the book in those circumstances. Not this book, not by a looong way! Use Look Inside to read the first chapter of Scoundrels and then consider that the surrealism and humour is only operating at about 30%. The book just gets better and better - assuming you are attuned to this sense of humour, as I am. Think Goons, think Monty Python, but written by a new energetic generation with the same pent-up ability and desire to take the mickey out of the genre.

Which genre, you ask? Think Ripping Yarns. Think of memoirs along the lines of “And then I twirled my moustache and casually disarmed the six thugs with one hand, whilst making a pot of Earl Grey with the other. Then, of course, I dressed for dinner. Even though I was alone in the tent, I still had to maintain standards.” (That was my invention, not a quote from Scoundrels, but you get the idea.)

Highlights? Possibly George VI making the cocktails or our two heroes (ummm... not sure "heroes" is the best word) inspiring Barnes-Wallis to design his bouncing bomb? No, it has to be Trevelyan crawling along the aircraft wing to put out the fire. I’m still sniggering about that in public several days later, getting suspicious looks on the train to Waterloo.

I loved this book. Volume Two is even better, but you really need to read Volume One first...

This book is best described as a hilarious absurdity or possibly the inverse of that. Set up as an epistolary memoir of two retired Majors Scoundrels and two lifelong major scoundrels, it goes one to tell tall tales of a British gentleman’s club extraordinaire and its two eminent members’ wild adventures in service of their country and their egos. This is a sort of book that might have easily gone too far down the farcical path, but instead it managed to tread the line of wacky and obscene, but oh so funny. Seriously funny. Laugh out loud funny. Very specific sort of funny, mind you, with heavy concentration of butt jokes, both as the main subject and with majors ending up being the butt of jokes. So not particularly mature, but it’s British, so it balanced out. This book covers two decades of Majors’ globetrotting undertakings from 1931 to 1951, featuring mainly their brave mad quests of WWII, but also from early childhoods, to meeting each other in school to trying to stay busy in the loopiest ways after the war. It’s…well, it’s a crazy book. It’s absolutely wackadoodledoo. Pure lunacy. But it’s so freaking entertaining, this insane romp down the well trodden historical paths of the last century by these comically revised James Bond like gentlemen. Possibly an acquired taste, particularly due to all the tasteless jokes, but those who enjoy a nicely roasted spoof should find this very amusing. The Majors are disreputable, louche, vainglorious rogues. Not the most heroic of characters, bickering to this day about events of their lives via email from their respective abodes where each of them have been remained for decades now. Is that any way to reward loyal spies? Well, with these guys all bets are off. But what a duo. Cinematically primed and ready for BBC. Thanks Netgalley.