Late Adopter

I've always been the sort of person who Misses Fads. For example, I got my first Duran Duran poster in 1985, after the band had split up and when everyone else was raving about Morten from A-Ha. Not only this, but I'm pretty sure my poster was of Andy Taylor, rather than Simon le Bon or John Taylor. How much more wrong could I have got it?

Next, witness the fact that I remain only dimly aware of the so-called Su Doku phenomenon that appears to have gripped the rest of the nation. Putting numbers in little squares is the kind of thing I might be made to do in my version of Hell. But give me three years and I'll no doubt come round to it.

And then recently I dropped into the late-adopter section of the popular fiction uptake curve and bought a book by the Dan Brown of cosy teatime literature, Alexander McCall Smith.

Now I love trashy novels as much as anyone (anyone who loves trashy novels as much as I do, at any rate) but Good Lord, this one is fucking awful.

I resent this book on three counts:

1. There's nothing worse than a trash novel with pretensions. Mentioning Immanuel Kant on every other page doesn't make your writing any more profound.

2. There's nothing worse than a trash novel that takes a supercilious moral stance. I read this stuff for escapism, not to be assailed with self-righteous, ill thought-out and inconsistent moral pronouncements.

3. There's nothing worse than trash novelists who show off how clever they think they are by creating an "intellectual" character whom other characters think is clever. For example, at one point the protagonist refers to people as being quick or dead, while another character admires her use of the word "quick" in this context. Look mate, there's nothing remotely clever about that, just as there isn't anything remotely clever about mentioning Plato on every other page.

And this is, of course, why I've never attempted to write a novel myself.