On Life, Death And Breakfast by Tony Parsons
HarperCollins, $39.99
The screenings of the phenomenally successful Bridget Jones' Diary were regularly punctuated by squeals of "Omigod! That's me", from members of the audience identifying with the heroine, even if they knew they weren't actually going to end up with Colin Firth.
Tony Parsons pulls the same trick in this collection of columns, which bank on his readers believing he speaks for them on the plights and predicaments of the modern male, even if they haven't been rock journalists who shared joints with Thin Lizzie or had the mixed blessing of having been married to Julie Burchill.
Parsons, author of eight novels including Man And Boy, is a clever man and knows exactly what he is doing. He makes a knowledgeable reference to Bridget Jones and quotes the New Lad self-identification with Sean O'Hagan's analysis of what it means to be a contemporary male.
And why would any bloke not want to relate to Parson's columnar personality? He's manly enough to want to take to his fists to punish those using bad language in front of his womenfolk, although he knows such action would appal those women. He's sports-loving but has got over it. He's a recovering car addict whose driveway houses a BMW X5 and a Mini Cooper, which don't thrill him at all. He works out with a ferocious personal boxing trainer. But he is sensitive, caring and a dedicated family man.
Much of the material in this book is drawn from men's magazines and it shows. There are pieces on male performance anxiety, two inveighing against fake breasts, junk sex, the double standards for cougars and young men as opposed to older men with partners young enough to be their daughters and, being British, there are pieces about football. There is an article about a former girlfriend who told him "she left me for a man with a bigger cock". Cocks, dicks and erections do appear with rather monotonous regularity, almost regardless of subject.
But Parsons is more talented than the average rentamouth columnist indulging in what a journalist colleague of mine once called "junking on to a keyboard".
His jokes are mostly good, his slant on some hackneyed topics is original enough to make them worth revisiting and he is the master of a punchy, energetic style.
Some of the articles, perhaps those furthest away from standard men's mag fare, ring with a genuine passion. His meditation on the death of parents has real substance and his thoughts on marriage are the results of serious soul searching. Even the fake breasts piece is less driven by their lack of appeal to men and more by anger that young women subject themselves to what he calls an act of self-mutilation.
But perhaps the angriest outburst is a political piece on the reduction in British social mobility which he links to the Labour politician Tony Crosland's attack on state grammar schools. He describes this as the British equivalent of the Cultural Revolution (although, in fact, the Tory Margaret Thatcher presided over a bigger slaughter of grammar schools than did Crosland).
Parsons is a man who has come to embrace what were once called traditional values and this would be a very safe book for all those Bridget Joneses out there to put into their hands of their men at Christmas, if they can read without moving their lips. It is a dipper, for the tone can be wearing in one sitting, and won't tie them up for hours. It may help to make them even better specimens of the wonderful modern male.
John Gardner is an Auckland reviewer.
