A Minor Triumph

Ireland’s best blogger makes the transition to paper without losing his edge, says Bridget Hourican

Twenty Major is the first Irish blogger to get a book deal. His blog, www.twentymajor.net, has won a load of awards and he has a highly committed/fanatical readership. His daily musings average 50 comments, and one entry (on celebrity nicknames) prompted 481 comments and counting. In the first six weeks of this year, he’d got 3,989 comments – Booker winner Anne Enright probably hasn’t had that feedback in her entire career. So it’s not surprising Hachette snapped him up.

Still, it was a risky move. Good chancellor/bad prime minister is the formula critics of Gordon’s Brown’s premiership are invoking, and good blogger/bad novelist is another take on it. Look at Mil Millington, who wrote a mildly funny blog about arguing with his girlfriend, which turned into a tediously unfunny book, Things my Girlfriend and I have Argued About – and where are he and his blog now? [Re-working the territory in more tedious books, it seems – just Googled him.]

But Twenty Major is a) much funnier than Mil; b) has a better name (possibly the best blogger’s name on the web); and c) has not just re-worked old blog material into a book. The same characters appear – Twenty himself, his dog Bastardface, Jimmy the Bollix, Stinking Pete, Dirty Dave etc – and the same preoccupations – visceral hatred of folk music, love of smelly old bars that don’t respect the smoking ban – so the novel is on familiar ground that will keep his fans happy. But it has a plot – a real page-turner – so it doesn’t feel like a compilation of musings awkwardly soldered together.

The plot is a parody of The Da Vinci Code. The Albino Monk of that bestseller is now a Ginger Albino and the conspiracy theory involves an attempt – thwarted by Twenty and his dirty, stinking mates – to make Ireland a nation of feel-good folk lovers. It’s all ineffably silly – there are no social, political points being scored. It’s certainly not satire, it’s simply absurd, and it has the exuberant anarchism of the truly silly.

Twenty Major is the child of Wodehouse, Python and, especially, Flann O’Brien. His 14th February blog entry is pure Keats and Chapman, about a statue of Disraeli descending from its plinth to violate a lady – leading to a pun on ‘statue tory rapist.’ In The Order of the Phoenix Park he has some great lines – “He’s been brainwashed somehow, and now we have to make his brain dirty again” and some very funny situations – Twenty hacks into the villainous concert organiser Alan Smithee’s email to find out what he’s plotting, and before logging out sends a memo from Smithee to the reception girl advising her to wear long pants as the smell of her fanny is making him feel sick. (A lot of good old puerile toilet humour here.)

Twenty isn’t up to his mentors – he’s less surreal than Python, too good-natured to be Flann, and doesn’t have Wodehouse’s silky plotting – and his blog is better than his book, but his book is a right laugh. If you’re male, you may even become a fanatical fan and join ubiquitous commentators Bald Devil, Northside Langer and Maggot.

Caveat: perhaps only men should be allowed to review Twenty. He is inordinately, even repellently, male, the way Jane Austen is inordinately female. Some writers can only write for one gender. It isn’t that Twenty is sexist, it’s that women don’t exist. There are maybe three women mentioned in The Order of the Phoenix Park – a (nameless) receptionist, a teenage Goth outside the Central Bank and a folk singer. They get a few lines each. And that’s it. Twenty inhabits the monogendered world of certain Irish males – he sits in dirty oul’ pubs with his mates, and women are a species far rarer than dogs or cockroaches. I may be wrong – it may turn out that Twenty (his identity remains stubbornly secret) is a happily married man, with a mistress, four daughters, and five close female friends (three of them ex-girlfriends) – but I think he’s a bloke with a beard who, if a girl asked him for a cigarette, would think she wanted a cigarette.

Comments

[Sean]

Good piece. I liked the blog, bought the book and liked it too.