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I
live in the Irish Bog where there are no bookstores, so Amazon is
my default resource when I need to buy books. One thing I rarely
do is consult readers' reviews of books (unless I wrote them myself,
praising my own stuff - hah, kidding).
The run of the mill review is something like "This is fast-paced
and has a twist at the end", or "I love the books Martin/Jeffrey/Ian
writes and this is no exception." I'm not knocking these. They're
useful for some. And besides it's encouraging that people are still
actually reading…
Sometimes
you'll run across a flash of mordant wit - a Glasgow reviewer who
calls himself 'Alan' but is really Alan P McGinty (or so he says)
begins a serious demolition job on a novel entitled Not Dead Enough
by Peter James with the warning Not Good Enough and then laments
the fact he actually finished it with sorry Presbyterian-like reflection:
"Now I have to live with myself."
Sometimes
there's a genuine surprise reviewer hidden in the pack, an original
voice and perhaps a subversive one - whose choice of review subjects
is so damn weird, and whose voice so strangely compelling, it makes
you begin searching for more.
I'm talking about Wayne Redhart, and he lives in the UK, and his
stated ambition is to become one of Amazon's Top Five Hundred Reviewers.
The
first I ever saw of Redhard's work was a review of Make Your Own
Sex Toys: Fifty Quick And Easy To Do-It-Yourself-Projects.
Redhard's tone is invariably deadpan: "There is a wide range
of projects in this book, from the reasonably straightforward to
those which call for a sizeable degree of skill. I rather struggled
with the hydraulic probe…But Doreen has grown quite attached
to her 'Bastille Battering Ram' and I am being asked to refuel the
petrol-driven engine at least once a week!"
He
refrains from five-starring the book on the grounds that he believes
"that natural approaches are the best and I soon found myself
returning to basic methods- a king-sized tub of lard and a rubber
glove is more than enough for me!" Doreen, by the way, is his
missus. Or maybe not.
In
his review of a play toy called Giant Breast (it exists, I checked
it out) fearless Redhard introduces us to another family member,
son Horace. "GCSE finals are always a big moment for teenagers.
The exams may be ludicrously easy, but my son Horace still found
them to be a real test of his fortitude. Without this squeezy stress
relief kit, I don't know whether he would have been able to endure
his intensive schedule of work without having a mental breakdown."
Redhard
worries that this squeezable item might give Horace the wrong sexual
ideas, and so he offers the kid the "same advice my father
gave to me (and each of my nine brothers) on my twenty-first Birthday
('Don't forget to spoff over the sheets, son!')." Nine brothers?
With Redhard you don't know which little snippet of info to take
as true. Is there really a Horace? A wife called Doreen? But that
'spoff' just touches you, so to speak, with a ring of truth.
Indefatigably
Redhard continues, throughout his 154 reviews, to seek out the odd,
the bizarre, and the often pointless.
It's constantly intriguing to contemplate Redhard's world. I leave
open the question of veracity concerning the Parish newsletter,
and the article on nude hang-gliding. My researches have yielded
no clue about the name of the Parish, and I've never seen the aforementioned
newsletter myself. But it comes down to whether I want to believe
in Redhard and his world, in a time of bland books blandly reviewed.
The
Nuns Having Fun 2008 Calendar is something of a disappointment for
our bold reviewer. "Although Reverend Dalton seemed perfectly
happy to receive this item as a birthday gift, I had initially anticipated
something worth putting up in my own study. I ought to have checked
the product description more carefully, but imagine my disappointment
when I discovered that this calendar is entirely unrelated to the
similarly titled masterpiece of Swedish cinema!… I had rather
hoped for a depiction of the scene in which an unusual use for a
bottle of 'Blue Nun' is demonstrated by an unusually blue nun."
A
further deduction.
Redhard
is bold not only in his reviews, but in his choice of gifts for
his minister. (That the recipient is pleased says something about
the Rev, or perhaps more about Redhard.) He offers further clues
to his self in his assessment of a handbook called Big Boys Use
the Potty! "This is great way of encouraging younger kids to
advance their skills early on. It was extremely effective for training
Crispin, despite a temporary setback - when he was awoken by the
sound of his drunken father returning from the 'Swan and Anchor'.
It seems that he went back to bed that night with the belief that
'big boys use the kitchen sink'...
Rarely, Redhard breaks out into a kind of meta-language that is
either inspired by a love of nonsense or an infusion of some mind-altering
substance, or is a snide scoff at the subject of the book, or all
three things at once.
Here he is on Studies in Social Sciences: State Aid to Public Schools
in Minnesota. "The number of Minnesotan students qualifying
as homeopathic-surgeons has been proportional to the cube-root of
fiscal ostiporation (when plotted exponentially on Manzelflauzig's
vestibularised index of agnostibility). Although Dr. Klonkhauser
famously disputed some of Kent's findings (with reference to Van
Flastenberg's Pyramid of Lechtenheim-modality) his work has since
been discredited and Kent's findings are taken seriously once more.
Successes aside, it is clear that further aid would be of benefit."
I
love the inclusion of 'Successes aside".
Eclectic, and liberal, and strange - and written for the most part
in a formal, grammatically-correct, conservative and sometimes slightly
cosy English - Redhard's reviewing world is one without boundaries.
Read them all, and you will learn much about the man, more than
you probably want to know.
You
will learn about his family, again more than you might wish to learn.
And you may come to the conclusion I did - that any search for the
real Redhard is doomed, and any quest to locate that strange parish
where he resides, and the pub where he drinks, is futile.
Unless you take a ride along a roadmap of English comedy until you
find a narrow secondary road that leads to where Redhard really
resides, in a quiet, well-imagined, corner of English humour."
Wayne
Redhart reviews on Amazon
Campbell Armstrong
http://www.campbellarmstrong.com/
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