A jaw-droppingly awesome review of a jaw-droppingly awful book
I was feeling slightly glum last night about some of the things I wrote about Sharon Moody over the past few weeks, because even though I did write that “I’m not saying Moody isn’t a skillful artist, or that she’s bad person” and reported that her paintings are “a spot-on recreation of the original, showing a high degree of craft,” my bottom line, that I was unmoved by her part in the power of the supposedly transformative paintings, had to be a difficult message to hear.
Not that I felt at all guilty about it, you understand, because I said what I thought and still think needed to be said.
But none of us who puts work out in the public arena likes our work to be unloved, unadmired, and (from our point of view) misunderstood, and I don’t like making anyone feel the way I know I would feel had those words been written about me.
Then I came across Philip Hensher’s devastating (and entertaining) review this morning in The Guardian of James Thackara’s novel The Book of Kings, and all I could do was laugh.
The review opens:
Reviewing someone’s first novel, it is customary to be polite about it, to find things to praise in it. So let me say straight away that James Thackara’s The Book Of Kings is printed on very nice paper, and the typeface is clear and readable.
And continues on to say:
And it’s terrible. Startlingly badly written, with no apparent understanding of what drives people or how people relate or talk to each other, it is a book of gigantic, hopeless awfulness. You read it to a constant, internal muttering of “Oh -God - Thackara - please, don’t - no - oh, God, just listen to this rubbish”. It’s so awful, it’s not even funny. There is not one decent sentence in the book, nothing but falsity and a useless sincerity. It may be the very worst novel I have read.
And closes with:
The awful thing is that Thackara really wants to say something. He is utterly sincere, and will probably be admired by people who believe that sincerity, rather than art, is the basis of a great novel. He is probably a nice man. He obviously cares deeply about these great historical movements and has done a great deal of research - my God, he has researched and researched and researched. But on the evidence of The Book Of Kings, he could not write “Bum” on a wall.
And I thought … wow. Compared to that, I sent Moody a bouquet.
Go read the whole thing now. It lifted my spirits. Maybe it’ll lift yours, too.
Originally published at Scott Edelman. You can comment here or there.