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However, like with other talented players on this roster (namely, veterans Dan Kennedy and Oswaldo Minda) there appears to be fatal flaws on both sides of the ball for this team, and that makes their prospects at the moment pretty bleak, despite some genuinely good players taking the field.
Most importantly, and perhaps most fatally, Bleak Old Shop of Stuff seems not to genuinely appreciate or love the thing it is satirising.
Hunt may have been a dreadful sponger – Dickens got his disingenuous leeching down perfectly when he turned him into Harold Skimpole in Bleak House – but he was also a genuinely radical activist who made things happen.
It's astonishingly bleak and cynical fare, the scabrous dialogue genuinely shocking (particularly in its depiction of impotent male rage and misogyny) but presented with enough grim wit to allow the knife to slip in gently.
When so many things in the world around us seem so bleak, it's eminently refreshing to see some genuinely good news.
The novel might have been unremittingly bleak if it weren't for the moral center provided by Faulkner, who is a genuinely likable guy.
Kate Allen, the Director of Amnesty International UK, says the piece "takes a bleak and uncompromising subject matter and transforms it into something poetic, haunting and in the end genuinely uplifting.
