‘Books are a load of crap’, wrote Larkin the librarian, for a bit of fun. But some books are not very good, no matter what guff they put on the cover. Those promotional blurbs, where adverbs and adjectives jostle for supremacy, are often as false as Judas.
Shami Chakrabarti, for instance, plugs With the Law on Our Side, the new book by Lady Hale, as ‘accessible, forensic, and breathtakingly humane’. Line-and-length humanity is clearly for those poor souls below the salt. Her ladyship is a grandee with a natty brooch, and must therefore be breathtakingly humane.
It’s verbal sludge. Also, do the publishers really think that Little Bo Peep’s approval will shift a single copy? Lest we forget, Chakrabarti was invited to investigate allegations of anti-Semitism within the Labour party, and claimed she heard little and saw less. You wouldn’t hang a rat on her say-so.
‘Breathtakingly humane’ can take its place in the latrine of perfumed blurb bullshit, alongside old favourites like ‘compulsively readable’, ‘achingly beautiful’ and ‘unflinchingly honest’. Honesty, you may have noticed, rarely flinches. ‘Searingly insightful’ is coming up on the rails, and as for ‘nailing the zeitgeist’, that was a cliché when Nietzsche was in short pants.
Susan Choi, up for the Booker Prize with Flashlight, is not just smart. She is ‘ferociously smart’. According to the Guardian, ‘she can build as well as she detonates’. A kind of literary Fred Dibnah, then. Stand well back from the chimney!
Another Booker nominee, David Szalay, got William Boyd, no less, to pronounce Flesh ‘disturbingly wise’. Boyd’s new book, The Predicament, has in turn been lauded by John Banville as ‘richly imagined’, a phrase so vague as to be meaningless. Banville and Boyd are first-rate writers. Why are they playing these silly games?
There is an outright winner. Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, reviewing TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker, said the book ‘radiates righteousness and purity of heart’. Six words to put anybody off their porridge. Back to Mount Athos, young man, where you may be as righteous as you like.
The puffers are a collegiate bunch, always on the lookout for new members. A recent recruit is that literary lioness Nicola Sturgeon, whose crits of Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris have revealed a lady very keen to proclaim ‘they’re all jolly good – and then came me!’
Sturgeon has been serenaded for her own jeu d’esprit, Frankly, composed in the writing room of that fabulous campervan. ‘Insightful’, said Andrew O’Hagan. Oh dear. ‘Unflinching honesty’, said Alan Johnson. Tripe, best served with onions.
Honesty, you may have noticed, rarely flinches
But the modern gushers have a few furlongs to go if they are to catch Michael Ratcliffe, a reviewer from the recent past. He could write well, Ratcliffe, but when he praised Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers as ‘a hellfire tract thrown down by a novelist at the peak of his powers’, it was probably not his shining hour.
Publishers have always known the puffery is absurd, and some are beginning to stamp their feet. Earlier this year Sean Manning at Simon & Schuster said the lavish coating of cherry blossom was ‘damaging’. The round dance of mutual congratulation, he said, was part of ‘an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary eco-system that often rewards connections over talent’.
In response, Boyd said that if he could help a young author find readers he was happy to add a few kindly words. Perhaps he was thinking of John Carey, who called An Ice-Cream War, Boyd’s second novel, ‘a towering achievement’. A cliché, but on that occasion Carey was right.
Towering achievement. Life-affirming. Peak of his powers. Top of her game. Dorothy Parker can cleanse these stables. ‘This is not a novel to be lightly tossed aside’, she wrote of Atlas Shrugged. ‘It should be thrown with great force’. Red ball into middle pocket.
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