Dust Jacket

Yet another task I have been putting off. It has been some time since I read Ek’s novel for the first time – and a few days since I read it for the seventh. In an attempt to squeeze a bead of brilliance out of the book I have been even more active than usual. I have read this book upside-down, in a boat, on a plane, in a tropical storm, in a darkened room (strangely unsuccessful), in an aquarium and whilst having my hair-cut. Has it improved? Yes, of course, and no, not really. Different things emerged at different times, but no melody could overpower that rumbling bass note. Basso ostinato. The eternal drone of gloom. The earthy thump of inevitability. Perhaps at last the time has come to write about this book.

I will be brief, for in one sense it’s a story we all know well. We read its kind every time we enter a bookshop. Enter our old friend The Dust Jacket – and his wily sidekick, Little Miss Blurb. It is common knowledge, one supposes, that dust jacket descriptions are fairly disreputable things; trumped-up taglines; the literary spirit crushed into a ball and kicked about by advertising agents; elegant and empty-headed sentences drawing you into paragraphs you wouldn’t usually touch with a twenty-foot pole.

And yet we read them. Most of us flick through the books as well (thanks to J-P Sertin, I have developed a habit of always turning to page 52) but it’s the dust jacket that has the greatest hold. A greater hold, it can sometimes seem, than the opinion of the critics’, the writer’s track-record, or the style of the sentences that lurk inside their ‘protective’ jacket, cowering like the body of a tortoise in the great shell of ‘sales potential’.

If I don’t maintain the truth of all these points, Edmund ‘Blumin’ Ek surely does. His latest book would suggest, after all, that he has quite an interest in the arguably evil ways and means of the dust jacket. So much so that he has created a unruly host of fake ‘blurbs’, which he has duly stitched together to form a novel (of sorts).

Here is the point at which I might swerve into a side-lane of detail. This, however, is only a brief review, so I’ll stick instead to the motorway of major statements. What we have here, basically, is a novel about style over substance by someone who has always seemed to have more style than substance. Ek, you may know, was always the poster-boy of the New Norwegian Movement (see here and here) though after his sparkling debut, doubts were raised as to whether he had the sticking power to see the original movements through to a satisfactory conclusion (or as his ex-wife put it, whether he could ‘pull himself away from video-games long enough to write another book). Dust Jacket alludes to those doubts, without ever dispelling them. It tells us that the author knows where he has been going wrong, but gives no hint of another direction. On the contrary, Ek keeps on going wrong. The object of his satire is himself – which is often the case, and can reap rewards, if only the writer gives some sense of learning the lesson he or she is giving himself. Ek never gives us any such sense. He is the naughty boy in the back row of a class he is taking himself.

There. Stick that on the dust jacket.