The Giles Wareing Haters' Club [Paperback]

For a born and bred American (so I understand) Tim Dowling has a peculiarly English sense of humour. For Americans it's the big things that get you down. For the true Englishman it's the endless multitude of everyday trivial hiccups that is far more depressing. Mainly because there seems to be no end to it.

If you like Dowling's Guardian column then be sure you'll enjoy this. Part of Dowling's success as a journalist is that he doesn't veer far from home and knows his limits - unlike Wareing, Dowling's alter ego in this book, who essays a ponderous heavweight piece on the Barbary War. You'll already have guessed that Wareing is more or less the Dowling of the Guardian. And, like the real thing, Wareing, tired of, but beset by, work and family, decides to pass some time by Googling himself. He finds that, however insignificant he may appear, there is, out there in the universe that is the internet, a group of people who truly hate him with a vengeance.

Part of the joy of the book lies in the irony that Wareing just isn't bad enough to be really hated. His columns are next day's fish and chips and he makes no attempt to hide this fact. He may be freelance but he remains a wage slave, churning out rubbish about the history of the moustache and the virtues of VHS as against Betamax. Only the truly weird can find real offence in any of this. But the internet is the natural habitat of the truly weird. And finding himself the object of derision, Wareing sets out on a quest to seek out and identify his detractors, to the point of adopting an on-line personality and meeting for drinks in the pub. All this while going to war with a local hoodie, consuming increasing quantities of a prescription drug purchased from a park dealer and forming a relationship with the most awful of drunken celeb who is in and out of rehab.

If you enjoy keen obvervational humour and the earthbound existential horror of everyday family life then you'll probably get through this in a couple of readings, as eager as Wareing to see the mission against his detractors through to whatever appalling end might await. Some may find the ending a little flat but it seemed just right for me. Such is life for Dowling/Wareing and us all - small spikes of tedium graphed against time.

So if you have a few spare hours over the holiday, get hold of this and prepare to enjoy.

I'd hesitated before buying this because, even though I enjoy Dowling's column in the Guardian Weekend magazine, I'm not a big fan of whimsical, humourous novels. But while The Giles Wareing Haters' Club is funny, and at times a bit too whimsical for my liking, its depth and heart surprised me. By the end of the book, I was unexpectedly moved by Giles's dilemma and found myself relating to this hapless, at times infuriating character. If you're a fan of Nick Hornsby, you'll enjoy this. In fact, it's the book that Hornsby's How to Be Good should have been.

In Tim Dowling's brilliant humorous journalism, there has always been a welcome sublayer of middle-aged male angst ("I like to think that I have now passed through my midlife crisis and come out the other side (although this is not strictly accurate because I have discovered that there is no other side)"), so it was a relief, to me, to know that the subject of his debut novel The Giles Wareing Haters' Club is a middle-aged humorous journalist - although this will be enough reason for others to slam the book closed before they've even opened it.

But as suburban, middle-class, comic novels go, this is everything we could hope for, a sort of Nigel Williams that doesn't get boring halfway through. Giles Wareing is a man who has begun to feel that he's not really participating in his life. He writes sycophantic puff-pieces about grotesque celebrities ("his novel covers several other themes, including gangsta rap, the post 9/11 zeitgeist and the redemptive power of fox-hunting"). He mends household appliances ("The microwave beeped and went dark. It was as if a little play about a rotating mug had come to the end of Act I"). He develops gout and is unable to refuse going on talk shows to discuss it ("I had dreaded the notion of becoming Mr Gout, but now that the title had been conferred I felt oddly proud"). He has erotic dreams about women who call at the door to try to get him to switch electricity suppliers. He feels detached from his sons, whom he refers to as "the older one" and "the younger one." And of course, he worries about getting older:

'"I'm forty," I said quietly. This was not even strictly true; I was still thirty-nine, but with less than a month to go I had made a decision to meet inevitability halfway, to attack forty at a run. It was supposed to help me conquer the fear, but in truth I'd only given the fear a four-week head start. Every time I said, "I'm forty," it was like pitching a stone into the pit of my soul just to hear the echo; incalculably distressing, but oddly habit-forming.'

His main vice is vanity-googling (when he enters the letter G in his search engine box, it springs up all his previous searches: "Giles Wareing +funny," "Giles Wareing +great,""Giles Wareing +moving," "Giles Wareing + respected"), which leads him to a dark corner of an internet forum, where he discovers a talk thread calling itself The Giles Wareing Haters' Club. Here, various netheads attack Wareing and his work, egging one another on in their mockery of each article of his that appears in print. Wareing, of course, cannot resist the corrosive effect of reading their splenetic rebuffs, occasionally joining in, and trying to find out who these haters really are...

All of this leads to a well-handled farcical plot involving clandestine dog-walking, murderous painter and decorators, addiction to prescription drugs ("Could it be that I had spent the last few months being insufficiently paranoid?"), stolen mobile phones, and an extreme right-wing pro-motoring lobby (which Dowling has satirised before):

"And now we've reached the point where we're all meant to believe that every other person is homosexual," said Robin, "when in fact the opposite is true."

"What do you mean," I said, "by the opposite?"

"Exactly what I said."

"That every *other* person is a homosexual?"

The book also strains toward things more profound, about dislocation and priorities, about kindness and a sense of proportion, and it's impossible not to wonder whether some of the angst does, for a journalist who has just produced his first novel, have its roots in truth:

"I will aim to become a better writer, of longer and more serious things, with the ultimate goal of rendering all criticism of my work, be it Internet-based or otherwise, laughably wide of the mark."

Oh give over, Giles - I mean Tim. Just keep us smiling and all will be well.