Date: 06 Jul 2009 07:21 Subject: There's nothing like literary viciousness Security: Public Mood: voyeuristic Music: Anything you can do, I can do better

 From 2001, Will Self rips Richard Littlejohn's novel into bleeding gobbets.  

One of my favorite bits:

SELF: It is a 400 page... I've read 200 pages of it and that is a 200 page recruiting leaflet for the BNP.

LITTLEJOHN: Well, you can't comment until you have read the other 200.

SELF: Why? Does it suddenly turn into Tolstoy?

LITTLEJOHN: You'll have to read it and find out, won't you.

SELF: Well it won't take me long.

A little later we expand on the theme:

LITTLEJOHN: I am absolutely delighted. The main villains of the piece actually are two white middle-class lawyers and policemen.

SELF: Wait a minute, the solicitor is dubbed as being part of an entry-ist plan by left-wing Islingtonians who kind of submerge themselves - one of them becomes a policeman who incidentally is graphically depicted masturbating with a truncheon - and the other one is a gay lawyer who runs a left-wing - a kind of firm that actually is vaguely impossible - that operates out of the Gray's Inn Road. I have read your book Richard, I do wish you would stop saying that I haven't. I have read 200 pages, I read them quite closely.

LITTLEJOHN: But you haven't read the book in its totality and you have to read the book in its totality.

SELF: Why?

LITTLEJOHN: In order to understand it.

SELF: Does it turn into Tolstoy at page 205?

LITTLEJOHN: No it doesn't turn into Tolstoy. I don't set out to be Tolstoy. It is a much more complex book than that.

SELF:Than Tolstoy?

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