Sometimes, when someone really doesn’t like your work, they can get a little carried away…
Getting your reviews is always weird. Rarely are you depicted as a human being doing a thing you do. Usually you’re something extreme: a genius, a confidence trickster, a reincarnation of Shakespeare, or a talentless hack to make an entire nation ashamed. And that’s fine. It’s the nature of the beast, and you take what comes, good and bad. The bad is usually more instructive, the good gives you a warm fuzzy.
Occasionally, however, someone so loathes what you’ve done that they feel the urge to behave as if you came into their house and peed on the carpet in front of their mom. And that is also, in its own way, fine. It’s weird and a bit alarming, but it’s sort of what happens and you roll with it. Controversy is good, you say. All comment is good. And that is true.
And very, very occasionally, someone does what some guy in the French press has done to me over the release of TGAW in France: they say something so cutting, so desperately unkind, that it somehow turns itself inside out and comes out quite nice.
The dude says:
this book is shit. It is total crap. It is so bad, the pages should be cut up and used for insulation in the houses of the poor, and when the poor are elevated to wealth and status and the houses are no longer necessary they should be burned and the ashes shot into the heart of the sun so that the earth is not contaminated with the badness of Nick Harkaway’s literary spewings! Harkaway himself should be tied to a stone the size of Manhattan and dropped from a great height into the pit of an active undersea volcano, there to dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire for daring to defy the gods with his shocking narrative incompetence!
It is distantly possible that I am being a bit free with my translation. But this is the burden of his song, the heart of his rede.
Which in and of itself is pretty solidly negative, and you have to admire the strength of feeling. And I was, I will confess to you, a mite saddened and contrite.
And then he says:
This book is so lousy, it is only slightly less lousy than the work of that titan of novelistic shit, that ghastly intellectual slime mold whose merest written utterance is so crusty and pustulant that it could infect you with cooties of badness if you so much as breath near a bookshop with stocks it, that louse of literature, his father! Oh, yes! It is only a wafer less rubbish than that!
Yes. I am so totally caned! I have been pwn3d! I am only a bit less bad than my father. I must go now and…
Wait…
I am less bad than he is? So, like, better?
Muuuhahahahaha.
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[Edit: It has been delicately suggested to me that I might point out that the reviews were, by and large, raves. Just so that no one gets the wrong idea in France. :) ]