Is this a book only a nanny could love?
AS CRITICS LACERATE JACOB REES-MOGG’S ‘SOUL-DESTROYING’ HISTORY TOME ...
Just how indomitable is Jacob ReesMogg? His first book has just come in for one of the most wholehearted critical shreddings of recent years.
Over the weekend, his study of the Victorians was reviewed in three different places by three of our most eminent contemporary historians — A.N. Wilson, Kathryn Hughes and Dominic sandbrook. two of them — Wilson and Hughes — are authorities on the Victorian era, while sandbrook writes brilliant histories of the 20th century.
they all agreed that ReesMogg is a terrible writer. ‘ At least we know the Victorians isn’t ghostwritten,’ wrote Hughes. ‘ since no selfrespecting freelancer would dare ask for payment for such rotten prose.’
sandbrook argued that ‘ReesMogg’s prose barely reaches undergraduate level’. He then offered strong proof, quoting the sort of rambling, pompous sentences that listless students throw into their essays in order to reach the required number of words.
‘On and on it goes, in the same plodding, Pooterish style,’ continued sandbrook. ‘Did ReesMogg really write this? Or did he get the workexperience boy to do it? In any case, the overall effect is souldestroying. there have been many books on the Victorians, but surely none as badly written.’ ReesMogg, he concluded has ‘all the wit, style and literary elan of a Bulgarian boiler salesman’.
For his part, Wilson thought that ‘the Victorians consists of a dozen clumsily written pompous schoolboy compositions’. He pointed out various errors and misjudgments before concluding that ‘the author is worse than a twit’, and that his book will be ‘ anathema . . . to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply common, sense’.
You would have to be either a saint, or a member of ReesMogg’s immediate family, or his nanny, not to experience a tingle of pleasure when reading these reviews. there is something about a bad review, beautifully written, that makes all but the kindest heart soar.
A personal favourites is this, by Evelyn Waugh, on the poet stephen spender: ‘ to see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.’
Other great takedowns have been markedly less dainty, opting for the bulldozer over the scalpel.
In a letter to his friend Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis wrote this of Dylan thomas: ‘I have got to the stage now with him that I have only reached with Chaucer and Dryden, not even with Milton, that of violently wishing that the man were in front of ME, so that I could be demonically rude to him about his gonorrheic rubbish and end up walking on his face and punching his privy parts.’
Amis’s son, Martin, was no less harsh on the revered Cervantes, calling him ‘inhumanly dull’, and comparing Don Quixote to ‘an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative’. In turn, Martin Amis was given a taste of his own medicine by tibor Fischer, who wrote of his novel Yellow Dog: ‘It isn’t bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It’s not knowing where to look bad .’
In my experience, authors hurt by a bad review like to imagine that the critic had a hidden agenda and was motivated by malice, jealousy or revenge. they can’t bear to think that their critics sincerely believed that their beloved work was rubbish.
NO doubt, ReesMogg will comfort himself by imagining that Wilson, Hughes and sandbrook were somehow ‘politically motivated’, though none of them is known as a torchbearer for the Left. Now that they have eviscerated his selfimage as a brainbox, will ReesMogg be deterred from embarking on a second book?
Dominic sandbrook said that ‘the prospect of ReesMogg in Downing street struck me as a ridiculous idea. But if this is what it takes to stop him writing another book, then I think we should seriously consider paying that price’.
But there’s something else to bear in mind, concerning his vision of a golden future, postBrexit. His book is riddled with historical errors. He even thinks Pontius Pilate is spelled ‘Pontius Pilot’. If ReesMogg can make so many mistakes about the past, why should we trust him to imagine the future?