The flat-pack columnist
If I were in the habit of taking prefabricated themes from a small number of blogs and reconstructing small variations on them week after week in three different publications, I doubt I'd have the chutzpah to write the following:
A passing respect for your mother tongue is enough to make you wince when Dan Brown takes a chainsaw to the old girl and slices her into clichés and easy-to-assemble sentences. Why millions of people have bought the literary equivalent of an Ikea flatpack is a riddle beyond Brown's power to solve. It is a page-turner, to be fair, with a mystery that pushes you past the arthritic dialogue of the stock characters.
And who would those stock characters be? Surely not the Islington "left" intelligensia enthusing about Gilbert and George Galloway in between lines of coke? The Archbish perhaps? He now seems to have a walk-on part in every Nick column, and is at it again in this one too. Indeed Nick is promising us more:
While we wait for the predictable consequences, this column will have a new feature: What the Archbishop of Canterbury Won't Discuss.
In the section on Darfur (page 17 in the instructions, where did I put that allen key?) there are worrying signs that Nick is morphing into a clone of Anthony Browne of the Times:
We cannot bolt the gates of Fortress Europe and pretend the crisis has nothing to do with us. We ought to have learned by now that the people smugglers will bring in asylum seekers and, with them, new racial tensions.
A seal of Dacre?
A passing respect for your mother tongue is enough to make you wince when Dan Brown takes a chainsaw to the old girl and slices her into clichés and easy-to-assemble sentences. Why millions of people have bought the literary equivalent of an Ikea flatpack is a riddle beyond Brown's power to solve. It is a page-turner, to be fair, with a mystery that pushes you past the arthritic dialogue of the stock characters.
And who would those stock characters be? Surely not the Islington "left" intelligensia enthusing about Gilbert and George Galloway in between lines of coke? The Archbish perhaps? He now seems to have a walk-on part in every Nick column, and is at it again in this one too. Indeed Nick is promising us more:
While we wait for the predictable consequences, this column will have a new feature: What the Archbishop of Canterbury Won't Discuss.
In the section on Darfur (page 17 in the instructions, where did I put that allen key?) there are worrying signs that Nick is morphing into a clone of Anthony Browne of the Times:
We cannot bolt the gates of Fortress Europe and pretend the crisis has nothing to do with us. We ought to have learned by now that the people smugglers will bring in asylum seekers and, with them, new racial tensions.
A seal of Dacre?
posted by Captain Cabernet at 3/12/2006 08:57:00 AM
10 Comments:
Definitely.
This 'new feature' on the Archbishop of Canterbury is some way from his 'It's so easy to attack Christians' piece of two weeks' ago, isn't it?
I think before the year is out Nick might denounce the views he expressed in the first paragraph of an article by the time he gets to the end of it.
the Darfur bit is wrong, btw: it is possible to exaggerate the importance of the UNHCR decision and Nick has done it. The really important decisions going on in Sudan at present involve security, not humanitarian aid.
Matthew's thesis that Nick is happy to mock the Archbishop but scared of saying anything nasty about Muslims could be confirmed in two weeks btw, when the Arab Union holds its annual summit in Khartoum.
Amazing.
'Asylum seekers' cause 'racial tension', do they?
Yes, forget the BNP, racist immigration policies and 'moral panic' headlines in the Sun and the Mail - they're not to blame.
It's Africans fleeing genocide that're to blame.
Nick's a fat mess.
I wouldn't perhaps put it that strongly, but certainly it's strange to write a column about how wrong it is to indulge in easy attacks on christians and then attack possibly the leading Christian in Britain in every column.
It's pure Decency, though, isn't it? What matters in Sudan is not what is going on, but what the liberal left, here personified by the Archbishop of Canterbury (again somewhat at odds with the Gilbert and George column), has been saying. And that is similarly the most important thing over condoms and HIV, rather than the Pope's policy, an issue I can't remember Nick ever mentioning before (and which he probably overstates).
It's just that he's a bad and lazy writer these days, I'd say. That first paragraph in particular would shame the polemicist in the Bromsgrove Standard.
Oliver Kamm's approving cite is really just repaying the favour. The "hypocrisy of the Anglican church" theme is a straight lift from Kamm in the first place, as I said in the other thread.
Btw, on the basis of the Falun Gong post on Harry's Place today, I would like to place an early bet on next week finally being the week when Nick gets round to his "the left's silence on China" article.
I think we've discovered Nick doesn't write his own headlines, so you wonder what he did to the sub-editors to deserve:
Dan Brown has been called many things, but never 'my hero'. Until now
Indeed on his own site it is
The Freedom to be Stupid
But on both the Obs site and his own, the 3rd item is titled
"Invasion of the Story Snatchers"
Are reptilian humanoids stealing stories from HP Sauce and placing them in the national press?
HP (aka little green soccerballs)
Make it short, make it snappy, make it up.
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/03/update-on-galloway-smear.html
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