Overwritten, overlong, over-analytical and pretentious, this biography of the poet-soldier Rupert Brooke - who died in 1915 - not merely gives literary biography a bad name but, more seriously, imperils the mental health of its unfortunate reviewers. I would be telling a lie to say I have read every word of it, for I have not the endurance for that literary equivalent to Croagh Patrick; but to judge from a prose style which is unencumbered by economy of any kind, my professional delinquency has apparently been more than matched by that of the book's editor.
And allowing myself a small, tight smile at that little oxymoron, I will proceed with this review. Brooke's poetry has become emblematic of a mythic pre-Great War England - village greens, elm trees, cricket and so on - but one would have to be astoundingly thick to take that pastiche seriously; which makes Nigel Jones's self-declared task of the demystification of Brooke and his time almost heroically redundant.
Brooke was not prolific, and he has bequeathed the English language a few imperishable phrases - "Stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?": "Now God be thanked Who has matched us with this hour": and of course, every line from his most famous poem, "The Soldier", the simple-minded patriotism of which is free of the sardonic bitterness which infused much of his work.
There is no doubting the subject's iconic charisma: but that surely reflects more on the society that so elevates him. As a poet, Brooke is distinctly second-rate. Could his short life and inconsequential verse merit nearly 500 pages of biography? And are our own lives so pointless that we should spend them following the minutiae of Brooke's public school adolescence? There is barely an opened fly or an idle doodle during prep without Jones's omnipresent form ready to pounce and exultantly analyse, as if we were enriched by this detailed trawl through the callow turmoil of male adolescence.
"It takes a huge leap of imagination for us at the end of the century whose batting he opened to imagine what the mere words `Rupert Brooke' conjured up for his contemporaries," writes Nigel Jones. And that smugly egregious pun sets the style on a work which makes no attempt whatever to leap into the mores of the time.
So, we are tut-tuttingly told, Brooke was both an anti-Semite and "homophobe", as if such prejudices were not the norm in Edwardian England. Even more unsympathetic to the ethos both of then and of that larger world of today - aside, that is, from that of Oprah Winfrey confession-freaks - is Jones's denunciation of Brooke's concealment of some teenage homosexual escapades from his mother: "Even as a grown man he cannot face confronting her with the true facts of his sexual - but by now respectably heterosexual - life." As if it were the norm, then or now, in adulthood to tell one's parents about one's jolly adolescent japes behind the cricket pavilion with Carruthers Minor.
Still, this book provides the odd, delightful little truffle in its porridge of ennui, such as the full frontal nude photograph of Katherine Cox, to whom Brooke lost his virginity, and to whom he later wrote: "I remember the softness of your body; and your breasts and your thighs and your cunt. I remember you all naked lying to receive me; wonderful in beauty." To which any man who loves the female form can only reply: and so say all of us.
But such moments are far and few between. When we read that "pulling the emotional strings of his friends was meat and drink to him as his role of puppeteer", we get a truer picture of this biography: lazy metaphors, lazily mixed, with almost every event, no matter how trivial, examined with lugubrious solemnity: and with worse to come. "The emotions he had felt then, and had only begun to slough off after a month of the most bitter suffering, returned in their naked fury: shock, disbelief, betrayal, jealousy, fear, rage, dismay - one by one, like falling clubs, they crashed into him with dull thumps."
Dull thumps, eh? By Jove, if you want to know what dull thumps feel like, read this book.
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist