A possible contender for My Least Favourite Book

**Little Update ***

Hello! I'm about to put another post up (well, I'll get round to it tomorrow morning, at least). But before I go ahead, I wonder if any of my regular visitors (or even a newbie) could tell me if they've registered my blog with a search engine called alexa.com? I keep getting the strangest email alerts from them, with 're Your Blog' in the subject line. But what with all the current hoo-hah about viruses etc, I'm too much of a wimp to open them! I did, however, check myself out via their search engine, and the results were really weird - one visitor a day, or something. Oh, this is all too spooky! Does anyone have Dr Who's contact details? He'd know what to do!

Anyway, as I said, I'll be freshening us up tomorrow. Until then ... keeeep dancin'!

Tony Parsons: My Favourite Wife

Once upon a time, Tony Parsons was a ‘hip young gunslinger’ for the NME. When he grew up, the ex Mr Julie Burchill dabbled in writing rock autobiographies, regularly appeared in ‘pundit pop up’ form on several late night arts and culture smugfests and even penned a Jackie Collins-style blockbuster (‘Platinum Logic’, 1981) in an early bid to set his working-boy-made-good cap at the literary charts. But In 1991, he eventually found his niche. “I know”, he said to himself. “I’ll be just like Nick Hornby, giving 30-something men a popular fiction genre of their own - which I’ll take credit for defining as ‘lad lit’ - while also proving what a sensitive New Man I am”. So, a series of novels (from ‘Man and Boy’ in 2000 to ‘One for my Baby’ some years later) were duly churned out, each becoming increasingly cheesy, platitude and cliché laden as time rolled by (though it has to be said, each had their own merits in a guilty pleasure kinda way).

Last year – perhaps in a vain attempt to rekindle his youthful hipster credentials – Parsons gave us ‘Stories We Could Tell’ – a ‘contemporary love story’ set against a late-1970s backdrop, with a music paper journalist as hero/protagonist. Sound familiar? It flopped. So, our Tone has returned to familiar themes with ‘My Favourite Wife’. “A veritable Barbara Cartland in trousers”, cooed the Independent (bless ‘em). “Parsons explores that most cherished of male fantasies: can a married man maintain a happy home life while also seeing a third-world sex worker on the side?”.

Oh, for goodness sake! The straight answer is, of course, no – not unless the man in question happens to live in a dream world (ie, a Parsons novel), where every character he comes into contact with neatly complies with his own world view, the women are all completely one-dimensional, sexless robots and the men sycophantic misogynists who think that making references to reading the Guardian and loving their families will let them off the hook.

Okay, Parsons’ thoughtfully wrought and painstakingly detailed evocation of modern-day China (which forms the backdrop for the whole sorry tale) is vivid and, very occasionally, fascinating. It’s a shame that he’s buried such vigour beneath a dreary, self-serving soap opera wherein nothing much of any consequence - other than the repetitive ramblings of a married businessman having a mid-life crisis - happens at all.