Take Snakes on a Plane, now firmly established as the worst movie of all time and so bad it is good. Samuel L. Jackson mouthing Jackson-like dialogues but in the wrong setting makes it all hilarious. By common consent (and these things gain by repetition), it is accepted as the worst. This is rather like the six billionth baby or the one millionth passenger on an airline. Common consent is the key.
Sadly, there is no such consensus on the worst book published. If you think it could be Fifty Shades of Grey , you will have nearly two million people — those who made it a best-seller — disagreeing. If you say “anything by Chetan Bhagat”, that’s another few million you will have to convince.
Even bad writers might have a good book in them. Paulo Coelho is an obvious example. The Alchemist is putrid (I can see a million fans of the book shake their heads), but Veronika Decides To Die is eminently readable.
Coelho is master of the apparently profound. He writes like a series of get-well cards, his philosophy packed into such nuggets as: “It is the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them.”
And what about: “When we talk to a flower, all nature smiles. We must remain innocent, like the deer just before it steps into a trap.”
Well, Coelho didn’t write that, I just made it up. If it borders on the verge of sense (without actually crossing over into it), that’s because a whole generation has been fed on The Alchemist .
It is easy to like Coelho — there is an innocence about a man who believes he can put together short, transparent sentences and pass them off as spiritual outpourings. The simple is not always a mask for the insightful; just because the lines appear simplistic, that is no reason to read between them to seek wisdom.
Good writers are equally capable of issuing duds too. Not everything Hemingway or Updike, Roth or Rushdie wrote are classics. Across the River and Into The Trees was brilliantly parodied by E.B. White in Across the Street and Into the Grill, but the original itself was seen as unintended self-parody by Hemingway.
George Orwell has written about “good bad books”, a term he borrowed from G.K. Chesterton. Genre fiction falls into this category, the argument being — not that I buy it — that while the subject matter may be lowbrow (Orwell doesn’t use that word), the writing itself is enjoyable. Clearly there are bad good books too.
But what is literature’s version of Snakes on a Plane ? Perhaps Fountainhead , that one-time cult book for teenagers? The Twilight series? Surely self-help books and those chicken soup disasters are a notch below Snakes ? What about The Da Vinci Code?
Good books, as Tolstoy nearly said, are all alike; the bad ones are terrible in their own way. From actors’ autobiographies to “inspirational” works, the range is wide.
Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu
