Hornby/O'Farrell Can YOU Tell The Difference?

nope.

Hornby's number 1. (have never read anything by either of them. have never even heard of O'Farrell.)

at risk of self embarrassment I would say hornby is 1. and I made that decision before reading on to see the other posts.

I'd say Hornby is no.1

could he pick out whether it was one or two? i suppose if he knows hornby well, he would though.... as he wouldve prolly read it. passage two sounds a bit more laddish than one.... still dunno though.

passage 1 is crisply written and sure of itself. stylistically, passage 2's a bit of a train wreck. check out that double 'really' in the first sentence, and the ugly 'therefore probably' juxtaposition in the second sentence. if Hornby deserves even half his reputation, he can't have written 2. Fish, have you got some little presents ready for those who guess correctly?!

Debate continued A: *guesses* B: nope ... wrong! A: Bugger! B: So that proves it doesnt it? A: Perhaps. B: *looks smug* A: *huffy* well the only thing it really proves is that you are good at picking 2 passages ...

Have met John O'Farrell (He tried for election in our local borough...ha ha Labour in Berkshire...obviously an optimist). He actual admits that he is riding the Hornby gravy train but I found him a genuinely kind and gentle chap. However, I am not a Hornby fan (sorry, Ralph) so I cannot tell the glossy winner from the also ran. It's all tosh to me.

Sad fact: I know that the first one is O'Farrell because it is from 'The Best A Man Can Get'. Skulks away to find a life....

I thought it was two, chiefly because O'Farrell writes about politics and only politicians would have the sort of education where they know about the battle of Malplaquet. Two is much more blokey. Neither of them are particularly well-written. Were they genuinely plucked at random ? The one bit of Hornby which stood out for me is in High Fidelity when his girlfriend introduces him to two people that he likes enormously and then when they're out of the room, shows him that their record collection is filled with Tina Turner albums. However, he then cops out and makes the narrator like them anyway and realise how shallow he is. I'm not nearly as music-obsessed as his narrator was, and I wouldn't have been able to set such a musical crime to one side. If you're going to write about shallow folk (and somebody has to - I am a champion of shallow), then you need to stick with it and not cop out and give the character depths and maturity. I did like High Fidelity, but to be honest, there's not a sentence I could find by close scrutiny that would measure up to something random from London Fields.

was it wolfie? i read that as well... shows what a memory ive got....

was it wolfie? i read that as well... shows what a memory ive got....

Thought O'Farrell's book about life in the Labour party was very good. Liked Fever Pitch and High Fidelity but haven't bothered with Hornby since. I think the main difference between them is that O'Farrell has considerably more hair.

well bollocks. I've never read an O'Farrell and it must be 18 months since I read 'about a boy'. Luckily I find self-embarrassment lasts no longer than a guilty feeling does with me. so I'm already over it. *vows, yet again, never to join in threads about writing from elsewhere*

yep you gimps all got it wrong ... the prize goes to wolfie ...

the prize goes to Hornby, i'd say. if your excerpt is any marker of the stylistic quality of his prose, he must stand out as one of the great literary anti-talents of the last fifty years.

i am no fan of hornby chant ... yet he is popular with loads of people ... i enjoyed his book About A Boy and i hated How To Be Good ... (from which the above is extracted) ... the debate continued after this ... i felt i had proved that hornby wrote as badly as the next bloke ... or at least was indistinguishable from his clones ... and i felt it WAS agreed through the course of my debate the other night .... and backed up by this thread ... that the writing was unremarkable ... why then IS he so popular? ... his books are bought in the 100's of thousands ... they are made into films ... he is the one author you are likely to find on the bookshelf of many blokes who dont normally do much reading ... and this in itself is a bloody marvellous thing ... during the debate then we wondered if it was his ideas that made him different from say O'Farrell ... whose book The Best a Man Can Get provides the extract above ... and which i read with increasing distaste just to see what it was all about ... it's a weak book ... an airport bit of fluff ... the other thing it makes me feel is that i shouldnt be knocking hornby ... his success speaks FOR him ... where are MY best selling novels? ... MY films ... my awards from WH Smith? ... nowhere that's where ... i haven't written them and perhaps never will ... and the same goes for a lot of people here on the site ... every day i can read bloody good writing here ... and its the writing that comes first for me when i pick up a book ...the ideas alone wont sustain me ... i can't enjoy reading something written like those two extracts above ... but those people are published ... i'm not ... well i am not quite sure what i am wittering on about ... i'd just like some answers to questions i can't really formulate very well ... we can write but we dont ... why not? there are people on abc whose writing is MUCH better than those two examples above ... and much better than lots of novels you can pick up any day anywhere ... why arent they published? what makes the difference ... what facilitates the leap? i'd bloody well like to know ...

I ... often ... dream ... of ... being ... published .... but ... the ... typesetters ... don't ... have ... enough ... ellipses. (Is ellipses actually the plural of ellipsis, or of ellipse, or both, or neither?) ... hmmm ...

oh damn ... i thought that was going to be something interesting ...

Right I bided my time and some of you I know are waiting for me to join in the fray. So here goes. Hornby is great for the following reasons. 1. He is not a poet or a stylist, he is a writer of pure fiction. Nnothing wrong with poets or stylists but it can get in the way of a good story. E.Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy are amongst the few who can do both. 2. His pretensions are reasonable. Writers like Amis, Rushdie and Coe (authors who aim at a male audience, like it or lump it) cannot communicate in the way Hornby does. Rushdie and Amis communicate only with themselves in their writing, a kind of sordid masturbation if you will. 3. Hornby always has an eye on the prize, his audience. He knows the pressure points, when to turn the tap on and when to turn it off. 4. He knows about his subject matter to the point where there is no need for padding. 5. He can make the reader feel that they are being written about and that is priceless. 6. He will be around for years, People will love him and people will hate him. He will always be news. The advance feedback on the film 'About A Boy' is that it is a cracker. Ralph

sounds like Hornby just knows what his audience wants and gives it to them. point one. how true is his stuff about people? or is he just, like the Sunday Times, offering a kind of glossy lifestyle? is he just talking about men in the way they might like to think of themselves, but not, in fact, saying anything about how they actually are? how true is his stuff of life? point two. what is Hornby's formula? i understood it was something like:- life's tough for the modern male. his team is at the bottom of the league when they should be at the top. England hasn't won the World Cup for well over a quarter of a century. friends are settling down and could let you down. women are tricky and require emotional skills that our narrator is having trouble acquiring. moreover, women aren't satisfied with the old five minutes in the bedroom any more. they want the full three hours of tantric or they're not interested. will team get to the top of the league? will friends stay friendly? will bloke find girl he can learn to settle down with? have never read any Hornby, so correct me where i'm wrong. relatedly then, should writers write for their audience, rather than for themselves? should they just give the public what it wants to read in the most palatable prose possible? (and the public gets what the public wants...). should we all be out there in our anoraks conducting target audience surveys?

I've said so before in the forums but I think the only reason to write is because you can't possibly *not* write. I've read both O' Farrell and Hornby and liked both - they didn't change my life but they were an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. Chant, I reckon your synopsis is pretty fair but does that mean the work's bad? I have male friends who are obsessed by football (not many, admittedly, cos I can't stand it) I have more male friends who are worried about friendships changing as they get older and about getting the right relationship. Don't have any male mates who find spending more than 5 minutes in the bedroom a problem - but then again, I don't recall the blokes in these novels being rubbish in the sack either - just rubbish at holding down relationships. So, to an extent, they do reflect one side of life, and isn't that one of the things that writing is about?

well, i think that the very fact i can produce a synopsis of the books without ever having read them is pretty damning. we're talking about a guy who has won awards for his writing after all. i think my problem with it is that it breaks the world down into digestible chunks. it breaks the world down into recognisable cliches. we're creating a world that your 'bloke' can understand. we're not far from your 'all Frenchmen wear berets,' 'all women prefer a soppy love film to an action movie.' what has got lost in this paradise of cliches? well, life, i suspect. complexity. the world has got narrower. the world has got less interesting. if Kurt Cobain is in those books then he's a forlorn figure, sadly out of place amongst all these ordinary blokes. it would not be such an issue if Capitalism weren't the kind of beast it is. alas, culturally, Capitalism levels outwards. it offers us the tyranny of the majority over the minority. but we, because we're so advanced and modern, refuse to accept that this is happening. how could our glorious Capitalism which has given us so much be at fault? so we lie. we tell ourselves that Hornby is the writer of the age. we give him prizes. we call cliche 'sharp observational comedy.' i guess i also have a problem with the ordinary bloke. he doesn't interest me. this is the century of the ordinary bloke. i don't like him because he lays claim to what doesn't belong to him. when Britpop killed Indie by opening it up to everyone, suddenly everyone thought they were cool. but they lacked the very thing that made Indie cool - complexity. the ground for the emotionally complicated, the intellectually sophisticated or the sexually ambiguous that had been marked out by bands like The Smiths and Joy Division was suddenly open ground for everyone. and here your ordinary bloke came, stampeding to get in. he didn't notice that Blur detested your ordinary bloke and were taking pot-shots at him in every song ("following the herd down to Greece"). he didn't notice that Suede were only interested in the marginalised ("shave heads, rave heads, on the pill, got too much time to kill"). even Oasis cut a curiously out of place figure amongst the crowd. so that now, that's all we get. damp drama about ordinary blokes. damp music for ordinary blokes. ordinary blokes on every street. misanthrope that i am, i have gone on too long. shoot me down, guys!

i can forgive you all those jibes for that chant... the indie music analogy was brilliant, and spot on. x x x

Chant me old sausage Its a well known fact that the NME killed Britpop, just in the same way they killed progressive rock and punk. Market forces dictate and the power of whims are not even in the same ballpark. As for Hornby, give him a read. You cant judge unless you taste, its like censorship, how can you ban a tv programme without seeing it. Do you know what I mean, I am not asking you to take crack for crying out loud. I would love to have a beer with you it would a right laugh. Ralph

The only thing that irritates me about Hornby is that he seems to write within himself - I suppose there is something a bit difficult about writing about how inarticulate most modern men are. I think he nailed this almost completely with Fever Pitch, summing up just why it is that some men invest so much emotionally into football - it is obvious now, that men feel they can express raw emotions through football without feeling like they have lost any masculinity - but it didn't seem obvious to me until after Fever Pitch - Hornby did encapsulate a sort of vague feeling I had about why it ruins my week if United lose to Middlesbrough and why it is that I can leap about and flick the V's at two numbers changing the right way on a Ceefax page. (I won't watch the match on Oracle, it is bad luck). But isn't there something a bit safe about writing a book that says "this is a guy just like you, or someone you know, or your boyfriend" ? I'm not saying it's an easy thing to do - it is a hell of a knack to judge your zeitgeist like that, and maybe you need to do it to get published - but I'd rather read a book about someone who was categorically not like me. I want a book that takes me somewhere I could never go, not something that just holds up a mirror to everday life. I'd rather read a book with an author who delighted in words and was able to produce sentences that shine and dance, like Amis does in London Fields, or a book where the author takes risks like Jim Crace, or something where the author gets under the superficial skin of someone and shows us a tiny illuminating moment. I think that 95% of bloke and chick-lit writers will never be able to do any of those things, but I sense that Hornby could if he pushed himself. It is very frustrating to see someone write within themselves for the money, just like when you see a talented actor slumming it in a picture they obviously made for the cash.