The emperor’s new book

Saturday, 29th January 2011

The major problem here is reasonably straightforward — apparently George Negus cannot write.

Without a doubt, Negus recedes here, revealed as a silly paragon of the Cheesehummer. You know the type: the Bobo Fairfax readers who go along to hear worthy speakers at Gleebooks in Sydney or Readings in Melbourne. While choking down their Camembert, they literally hum (‘mmm’) their unthinking appreciation as platitudes are offered up, typically some reactive anti-Howardism. Negus is surely their king.

Maybe those people will buy this book, but everyone else should steer clear. Like the characters in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, most readers will be confronted with a terrible suspicion: ‘one of Australia’s most respected journalists’, as the publicity material would have it, just hasn’t got anything on. On the basis of this book, we must marvel at Negus’s past success and explain to future generations that, for whatever reason, ‘his noblemen held high a train that wasn’t there at all’.

On the cover Negus is wearing an unbuttoned black shirt, with a little neo-Pagan wind-catcher or something nestled in his chest-hair. That, combined with the dingbat prose, works like anti-gravitas.

No need for readers to put their hands on this book, then, and best to avoid Negus’s other efforts. If you want a book to read when you aren’t reading a book, seek help.

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Dani

February 4th, 2011 3:30am Report this comment

Ah, the first sentence of this review exactly summed up my feelings. I was given this book for Christmas and never got more than a few pages in because it was just so poorly written with sub-clauses inside sub-clauses. It sounded like a confused grandma recounting a tangled recollection from her youth, rather than any kind of prose I'm familiar with. Very poor editing, if indeed there was any at all.

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