Tuesday, June the 22nd, 2004

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Vaporetto or Bus?

A thumping great tome lands on the Reviews Editor's desk. It is nothing less than the Incredibly Detailed Report Of The Commission Of Enquiry Into The Provision Of Public Transport Services In And Around Hooting Yard As Requested By Civic Functionaries Many, Many Years Ago. It would, one feels, be a kindness simply to burn the thing. After all, is anyone ever going to read it, apart from your dutiful editor? Did it not occur to its compilers that decades-old research cannot simply be written up over the succeeding years, with agonising slowness, and retain any validity? One notes that the authors have opted to remain anonymous, or semi-anonymous, in that they have given their identities only in the form of cryptic crossword clues: thus we have Spigot in lane gets plank with Dutch cheese (4,8), General Editor; Dad's pie on hinge (6,9) and Peewit's churchgoer frantic with collapsed lung, says monster (8, 7), Associate Editors; Tenebrous elk, perhaps? (10, 12), Deputy Editor; Sounds like miasma of cloacal gruel hurled sideways (7, 7), Picture Editor; and not forgetting Large pig on holiday island (6, 9), Intern. As the great Terry-Thomas used to say, what an absolute shower!

This enormous volume is basically a mishmash of risible twaddle. Take this, for example: “The gorgeous vaporettos which ply the canals of Hooting Yard are run by a forward-thinking company which emblazons all its vessels with a startling logo of a budgerigar.” It is difficult to conceive of a sentence of similar length which contains so many errors. Or this: “The bus route between Blister Lane and the Dye Works at Chew Parva has won many awards for its revolutionary approach to timetabling, not least the employment of ”Little Severin, the Mystic Badger“, a real badger who predicts the timing of the buses by doing something or other with his paws. Little Severin is kept in a hutch at the Bus Depot and has become a star of local press and radio. He has also become the official sponsor of the Annual Cake Show.”

And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, how is this for blithering inanity? “The infrastructure of the pneumatic railway system, with its nerve centre on Yoko Ono Boulevard, was designed upon the territorial patterns of the funnelweb spider, hence the breathtaking beauty of the interchanges, sidings, and station tea-rooms.”

Dismissing the text with a groan of disgust, the reader turns to the maps, charts, statistical tables and appendices hoping that here, at least, some sense may be wrung from this preposterous book. All I can say is that it looks to me as if the work was farmed out to a gaggle of the younger inmates in the lunatic wing of Pang Hill Orphanage. What we have here—and it takes up over a third of the book as a whole—is a hideous collection of daubs, blobs and scribbling. Nor does it help that most of the pages appear to have been dusted with egg yolk and breadcrumbs.

There are those who will say that this undoubtedly imposing publication is a bargain, costing just eight panes forty, and that I am merely a cantankerous and grumpy reviewer with an axe to grind because my essay The Psychic Significance Of A Flat-Fare Structure For All Journeys On The Fiendish Pond Swivel-Engined Gas-Powered Subaqua Taxi Service was excised by the publishers at the last minute on the clearly ridiculous grounds that it was “pompous and self-interested”. Have they no shame?

Overall Rating : Bilge