Welsh squelched
Every once in a while, a book review comes along that is so harsh, so deadly, so unforgiving, it’s like watching an author get stripped naked and flogged right in front of you. The kind of review that makes you say a silent prayer of gratitude that it wasn’t your own book in the crosshairs – just before you email it to every evil-minded book friend you have.
Neel Mukherjee, taking on Irvine Welsh’s newest novel, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, in The Sunday Times, has written just such a review. Mukherjee doesn’t wait to get the flogging started. He begins: “Let’s call a spade a spade — Irvine Welsh’s sixth novel is so awful that, to paraphrase James Wood, it invents its own category of awfulness.” Amazingly, after that decidedly ungentle beginning, it only gets worse:
“Five novels later Welsh is still doing his substance-abuse-in-Edinburgh shtick, but it has become a meaningless brand — look carefully and you can almost see the TM symbol — emptied of all authenticity, forced and false. Like most such products, it should go straight in the bin.”
After spending 700-odd words stomping poor Welsh into the dirt, does Mukherjee then extend a hand to help the author up, maybe offer him a conciliatory drink in the bar after?
“This is a demeaning book that cants the reader’s soul downwards, making it feel complicit with the writer’s dishonest short-changing of his readership, telling them that this lazy, dishonest, appallingly written rubbish is the real thing while laughing all the way to the bank as a result of our gullibility. Those howls of rage of his early years have turned to the empty baying of a dog. Take him away.”
If it is true what Clive James said about damning reviews (”When you say a man writes badly, you are trying to hurt him. When you say it in words better than his, you have hurt him,”) then we can only wish Welsh a speedy recovery.
Related links:
Read Neel Mukherjee on Irvine Welsh’s newest novel
Read Clive James on ’snark’
