Notes on "Vote for ... who?" by Jonathan Maitland
It's not often that I throw a book down in disgust - in fact, I can't remember the last time it happened - but this is one of those books.
I picked it up in our local library in the hope that it might indeed be what was promised in the blurb on the back cover; an informal romp through modern British politics. But it's not that. It's the adolescent ramblings of a middle-aged man trying to sound like he's "one of the boys".
Honestly, I tried really hard to get into this book but Maitland's constant - and I really mean to use that word - efforts to sound like a bloke's bloke just drove me crazy. He goes to great lengths to make sure that every page has a handful of gags, even though most of them are simply not funny.
I can see what he was trying to do; he wants to make politics more interesting to more people. And in itself, that's an admirable thing to attempt. But the manner in which he does it just makes me gag, I couldn't get though most of his paragraphs without a grimace or a shudder; not because of some horrific fact I'd learned, but because the writing style and the language simply jarred.
Maitland wants to be mates with every bloke in every pub in the land. He tries so hard to sound like everyman, making bad jokes and awful non-funny asides as he goes along. There might even be a handful of people in most pubs who might appreciate what he's trying to do, might even find it funny; but I suspect that everyone else will find this as unreadable as I did.
Labels: books
