Editorial: Nothing better than a ban to lift interest

WELL, thank goodness Ted Dawe's award-winning teenage novel Into The River has been banned.

For starters, it was long overdue. We haven't had a book banning for 22 years and it's more than 70 years since Adolf Hitler led the way with mass book burnings.

In addition, it was not selling particularly well and the scything hand of the censor is usually guaranteed to push product.

And, of course, it has given lobby group Family First and its morally rectitudinous leader Bob McCroskie, who raised the issue with the censor, the headlines they crave.

Mr McCroskie has helpfully listed the number of times certain swear words are used in a book which has been hailed by the literary world - and not just for its "sexually explicit" content.

As teenage boys are, generally speaking, utterly obsessed with sex, it seems the perfect book to ban - the furtive "black market" trade will now have an extra frisson of excitement.

So Bernard Beckett, the chief judge when Into The River was named Book of the Year, can have his fears allayed.

He bemoaned the ban yesterday, saying: "Something we're trying to do is increase literacy, especially amongst young males from educational deprived backgrounds, and we're looking for material to engage with them."

Well, the censor may have played into his hands as youngsters put down their PlayStation consoles and forsake Grand Theft Auto for Dawe's forbidden prose.

The question now is: why stop there?

Another book frequently aimed at the young teen market, The Bible, with its tales of Sodom and Gomorrah, more begat-ing than you can shake a stick at, and mass carnage in the Red Sea has to be the next target.