Book of the week

Off The Record by Craig Sherborne (Text) $37

It’s never the story alone that makes a novel interesting. It’s the way the story is told.

Take iconoclastic Australian novelist Craig Sherborne’s latest effort Off the Record. It has one of the most familiar plotlines: a jealous estranged husband will do anything to win back his wife, including playing dirty tricks on her new boyfriend. This scenario includes such slapstick as the husband snooping around the boyfriend’s house at night and prat-falling over the shrubbery.

But if many of the plot elements are tried-and-true, Off the Record has a distinct nastiness all its own.

Told in the first-person by the jealous husband Callum ‘‘Words’’ Smith, this tale is set in the world of sensational tabloid journalism. ‘‘Words’’ has taken a position as chief reporter on an online, Melbourne-based, news service called Pry, which specialises in beat-ups of sleazy crime stories. In his 40s, ‘‘Words’’ regards himself as mentor to the callow younger journalists on the payroll. He enjoys running rings around the gullible trust-funded fool who set up the business and pays the bills. ‘‘Words’’ nicknames his boss ‘‘Pockets’’.

Much of Off the Record isa breathless canter through the nastier tricks ‘‘Words’’ plays as a bottom-feeding journo. One of his favourite wheezes is ‘‘stoning’’, which means setting up situations so that people will appear in a bad light. Wanna make Christians look bad? OK, set up the cameras and pay a derelict street person a handsome fee to go begging at a church service. Then, if the street person gets thrown out, write a story about how hypocritical and uncharitable these church people are. As you will easily guess, ‘‘Words’’ tries the same sort of tricks to bring down his wife’s boyfriend.

Up to a point this is bracingly nasty stuff, especially as the man telling the story has an inflated idea of his own cleverness and is clearly riding for a big fall. ‘‘Words’’ has ways of justifying what he does to both himself and his young teenage son.

But we know he is deluding himself. His behaviour is just as obnoxious towards family members and other journalists as it is towards the victims of his beat-ups.

The blurb claims this novel ‘‘skewers journalism and male vanity’’. Well… maybe. But the journalism in this novel isn’t all journalism and ‘‘Words’’ is such a one-dimensional character that his vanity isn’t the vanity of all men. As satire, this is the chief flaw of Off the Record. Its main character is a caricature. Introducing his impotence, halfway through novel, doesn’t cut it as an ‘‘explanation’’ of his behaviour.

Fun reading if you’re in a bad mood, though. – Nicholas Reid