RanDumbBy Mark Hayes Liberties Press, €12.99
There are some books that are so thrillingly good, you buy a second copy to lend to friends, because much and all as you want them to read it, you can’t bear parting with your own copy.
Then there are books which you can’t fathom how they got into print. This book definitely falls into one of these categories.
Mark Hayes left Ireland to live the dream in Hollywood. It’s difficult to know what that dream was though. He meets some models and actors, which seems like a small enough boast when you’re in LA. He plays some football, some of it with Robbie Williams, and spends an awful lot of time telling us how good at football he is (Hayes, that is, not Williams).
If you’re not impressed so far, then this book is unlikely to float your boat further.
Also, it's written in a style that is impossible to summarise, at least in words The Irish Timesallows on its pages, so here is an excerpt: "My Mum works in a school. Her friend works there too. She is dating a man. This man works in RTÉ. She told him. About me. He arranged. A meeting. With. A TV commissioning editor. In RTÉ. I was told. All this. Last week."
I wish I were joking and that this was an exceptional quote but the entire book is like this. All 300 pages and 70-plus chapters of it.
Perhaps the publishers felt it captured some sort of illiterate Irish zeitgeist: that everyone had suddenly regressed to the intelligence level of homunculi drooling over each other while waiting to develop opposable thumbs.
It is surely some sort of crime against humanity that I had to read this. The fact that a tree was felled so paper could be made to print this is also shocking. As Hayes himself might say: The. Horror. The. Horror.