I wasn't completely certain whether I had read this before or not, but it was familiar enough that I'm pretty sure I must have, just a very long time ago.
It was fun. Lots of the wit and humour I guess we all expected, and quite a lot of social commentary, which I also expected. I liked the characters and his descriptions of the settings, but I found the plot a bit disappointing.
We end up with effectively two quite separate story lines: The story of the Electric Monk and Gordon Way is told in parallel with the events surrounding Richard, Dirk, Reg and the 4-billion-year-old-ghost. Yes the two sets of events touch on each other, but just touch, either could have existed without the other with only very minor changes to the text.
On its own, Richard's side of the tale was fairly clever, with this integration of Coleridge's poetry and real life (well possibly real or possibly made up by Coleridge)
person from Porlock. The George III question thing had me re-reading those paragraphs about four times before I realised it was probably intentional (my ebook had a number of typographical errors) and kept reading to wait for the reveal. And on its own, Gordon's side of the tale was very funny and entertaining. I just found it a shame that the two sides weren't linked more tightly; I kept thinking Dirk was going to come out with some crucial link, but it never happened.
It's not a big deal. The book was fun anyway, I was just hoping for a bit more.