The Worst A Man Can Get
Mar 20th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
For several years I have visited London bookshops every 6 months to stock up on books to be enjoyed in the tropics, far from good bookshops. With a luggage allowance of only 20kg it was necessary to be very selective.
Quite what possessed me to buy it I don’t know, but I will own up here to the worst and least funny book I have ever read.
The Best a Man Can Get by John O’Farrell
You can read some gushing endorsements and, if you have time to waste, an extract, here. You can even, if you’d like to save trees but still waste your money, buy an e-book version.
It was so appalling, so execrable, so completely lame, juvenile, and above all, so utterly unfunny, that I finished it only out of some morbid fascination at its sheer badness. Not breathtaking badness either, not “so bad it was good”, it was just abysmal.
The review here is not nearly bad enough. I got rid of my copy to the local charity shop, but honesty compelled me to add an inscription to the effect that it was the worst book I had ever read.
I wouldn’t mention it at all but it was supposed to be very funny. Frankly, I felt defrauded. A.A. Gill is funny, and he can write (actually, he dictates). O’Farrell’s idea of humour can be gauged from the following gem quoted in a review of another of his books, Global Village Idiot
Okay, so one huge meteorite wiped out all the dinosaurs, but you have to admit it was incredibly bad luck that they were all standing in that exact same spot at the same time.
O’Farrell’s thesis in this book is that George Bush is the village idiot. A rather unconvincing case of “it’s not me, it’s him!”
I was surprised, since it was funny, to see that O’Farrell had written some of the jokes for Chicken Run (my own pleasure was, of course, much enhanced by seeing my children enjoy it so much).
It would not surprise me at all if more than a few of the snooks cocked at America, represented by Rocky Rhodes, came from O’Farrell (yes, there is a subtext about Mel Gibson, who did Rocky’s voice, being Australian, but that is very much an in-joke). A certain kind of Englishman has never quite forgiven the US for eclipsing the empire and so the Yankees must be brought down to size with humour, preferably with deft put-downs they don’t get.
O’Farrell is part of the left-wing media establishment in Britain (It is exuberantly healthy and confident and has no need at all to be a conspiracy). Which is why I had to listen to him on the subject of exams on BBC Radio 4 this morning over a late breakfast. He has as much right to earn a living on the airwaves as the next hack, and it was harmless enough. However, if the BBC took a leaf out of contemporary university exam marking practice in the UK, and evaluated the script without O’Farrell’s name on it, I doubt it would ever have been aired. Of course, it was a commissioned piece.
