The DYNAMITE! Files

I received a comment about my post on the ropy Ian McEwan novel Saturday this week, and my instinct was to hit the delete button because I knew the nitwit who wrote it had arrived at this blog for a very different reason. Then I realised I may not ever get a chance to publish anything quite so daft ever again, and it sort of ties in with what I’ll be writing about in my next post. So here, for your enjoyment and mine, are the words of some tit called Christopher Parkman in all their glory…

“How else dear boy is a character not going to have a thought ‘artificially placed there by the dullard narrator’? He isn’t real, it’s a novel, the clue is in the word ‘fiction’.

“Have you even read any Woolf? She practically invented that type of leaden psychological prose. What the fuck does expatiation mean anyway, do you mean expiation? You know what I hate? When people use long words that they don’t understand to try and make themselves look clever. Anyway I’m sure that you know better than Salman Rushdie, Clive James and Martin Amis who all regard McEwan as one of the best writers of his generation.”

Well, I was hardly challenging McEwan’s reputation, just expressing an opinion about one novel in particular which even some of his fans seem to think is a bit of a stinker (see comments). Full marks for noticing that “fiction” is stuff that’s made up, but this isn’t just fiction: it is considered to be literature, so it is supposed to use artifice to express some sort of higher truth or insight. To me, Woolf does this and Saturday doesn’t. As for “expatiation”, the word means to write in great detail, which the author does regarding the unease and conflicting opinions of the British public prior to the war with Iraq. “Expiation”, on the other hand, is atonement, which I gather is another of Mr. McEwan’s novels. Still, at least we can agree on one thing: it is annoying when people get unusual words wrong, isn’t it, dear boy?

Having said all that, I don’t think Christopher Parkman actually meant any of the badly-formed thoughts he thwacked into a keyboard with his limp, pudgy paw. Because the fact is, he called me, my friends and acquaintances “c*nts” on Twitter for no good reason, then came over here after I blocked him. So I reckon he was simply after a good old-fashioned interweb anger w*nk, and I sincerely hope he left this blog feeling fully satisfied.

And the reason for him being so narky? He doesn’t like the cycling club I ride with. Yep, it really is that shallow and pathetic. But there are quite a few chippy loners in the two-wheeled community who have a problem with London Dynamo, and I think it’s best I address the ‘Mo hate in one long, er, expatiation, rather than coming back to it in a series of desultory skirmishes like this one. Which is exactly what I intend to do next…