Culture

Scraping the barrels of blurb

January 07, 2008
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Book blurbs are aimed at browsers: those whose interest has been caught by a cover, title or author's name, and who want to find out more. They're the hard-sells of the literary world, and you'd think publishers would have got pretty good at them by now—it is, after all, 101 years since the fictitious Belinda Blurb graced the dust-jacket of Gelett Burgess's satirical Are you a Bromide?, giving the world this much-needed term. If the inside cover of one of the most recent books to arrive on my desk is anything to judge by, however, there's still some way to go. This is how the blurb to Peter Carey's His Illegal Self concludes:

Never sentimental, His Illegal Self is an achingly beautiful story of the love between a young woman and a little boy. It may make you cry more than once before it lifts your spirit in the most lovely, artful, unexpected way.
Who, exactly, is going to be persuaded to buy a serious work of literature by this kind of sentimental hyperbole? It's presumably aimed at those readers who've started to find crying only once during a novel insufficient: whose spirits need to be extravagantly prepared for unexpected liftings. I find this kind of blurbing far more irritating than the "page-turning masterpiece" stuff you get on bestsellers, which is at least supposed to be generic. The Carey blurb clearly thinks it's being sensitive, insightful and highbrow. It isn't—it's just doing a great author a severe disservice.

At the other end of the spectrum, mind you, are things like this (hat-tip to the little bird book review)—an account of Graham Greene's The Comedians which, frankly, I'm still not sure I understand even though I've read both it and the novel in question more than once:
Like one of its predecessors, The Quiet American, The Comedians is a story about the committed and the uncommitted. The Negro, Doctor Magiot, is committed. His last letter to Brown, who tells the story, is a statement and an appeal by the committed—by a man who has by his nature to share the terrible events of his time. But the Comedians have opted out. They play their parts—respectable or shady—in the foreground; they experience love-affairs rather than love; they have enthusiaisms—like Mr. Smith for his vegetarian centre—but not a faith; and if they die, they die, like Jones, by accident.
I'm not saying copy-writing is easy. But there's something disconcerting about praising someone's verbal genius in phrases that seem to have been cobbled together by a committee of bored GCSE students. Unless, of course, this happens to be your target demographic.