Boris Johnson, The Perils of the Pushy Parents (Harper, 2007)
Boris Johnson, Conservative Party MP and (as of this writing) the CP's candidate for Mayor of London in the 2008 elections, coming up in just two weeks, is not only a lunkheaded politician. He also fancies himself a sort of Conservative Roald Dahl, at least within the purview of his eighth (as far as I can tell) book, The Perils of the Pushy Parents. Now, when I got a press release about this some months ago, I gathered somehow that this book was self- or vanity-published; when I got a friend from across the pond to score me a copy, imagine my surprise when I looked at the same and saw the HarperCollins imprint. Yes, folks, Boris Johnson is big news in the book publishing world. And how could he not be, with illustrations that look as if they were drawn by a not-particularly-gifted twelve-year-old suffering from the early stages of Parkinson's and such timeless poetry as:
"The People's Circus of Beijing
Is suddenly not quite the thing.
Paintballing? A football match?
No, none of these are up to scratch.
'We need', mused mum, 'a novel theme
For little Molly's birthday dream.'
She crooked an eyebrow as she spoke.
Was that a muffled childish croak
Beyond the door? She frowned. But now
Dad yelped and smote his bulging brow."
Okay, yes, I'll grudgingly admit that it shows a great deal more of a sense of rhythm than most amateur poets do, even if it does have that four-on-the-floor thud thing going on, and it is kind of clever now and again. But, oh, lord, is it heavy-handed. You can't really get that from this excerpt (which I chose by opening the book at random), but despite the fact that I'm thoroughly behind Johnson's premise here-- that parents who spend all their time planning their childrens' days to mold them into little version of the parents need to step back and get slapped around a bit-- I do wish he'd kept to the amusing, clever bit instead of wallowing off into "the moral of the story is..." ground at the end.
Mildly amusing, but if you're reading this in America, don't let yourself be goaded into asking a British friend to procure you a copy unless you're full of morbid curiosity about the writings of a member of parliament, and what he could possibly have to say in a kids' book. It's right up there with Ted Kennedy's My Senator and Me. **
