Is this a joke? Well, depending on how cynical you are, there are several ways of evaluating this collection of Adrian Chiles’s weekly Guardian columns. The first is to see this as one of the finest comic literary deceptions since William Boyd’s “Nat Tate”? Perhaps the Guardian, which has a history of posting April Fools’ Day hoaxes, has decided to publish Chiles’s profoundly mundane observations about life in order to challenge its (often rather sanctimonious) readers to decide if the author’s views are sincere and to be taken seriously. 

How else can we make sense of columns with titles such as “You’re never too old to climb a tree”, “My first manicure” and “I have found the perfect fungus”? When you start to read this collection you hope that the headlines are ironic, acting as jumping-off points for something more philosophical. You would be wrong. The article headlined “Cheddar and stout?! This messing with hot cross buns has to stop” is comprised of several hundred words on why we should stop messing around with hot cross bun recipes (the opening sentence, “I’m cross about hot cross buns”, not only sets the tone very well, but also marks out the intellectual scope of the ideas you’re about to read). So, they could be a sustained joke on anyone who reads them. 

Another interpretation could be that they are actually very good indeed. Chiles himself has commented that they are intentionally banal, that they are about nothing, and that their appeal lies in their Pooterish preoccupation with the prosaic. But it is difficult to sustain such a position for very long: writing about nothing happening has to be skilfully done if it is to retain our interest, but much of the prose here is simply unimaginative and cliché-ridden. The observations are not only boring, but they are often written about in a turgid, lifeless style: he’s noticed that the many successful people he’s met have often worked hard, that business jargon is annoying, that night clubs tend to be for young people, that Ronnie O’Sullivan enjoys winning snooker tournaments … on and on they go, but too often the prose is as flat as the subject matter is uninspiring. It is almost impossible to read ten pages without becoming distracted. Is this intentional? Are these studies in tedium perfect evocations of the pointlessness and triviality of our postmodern lives? Well, given that Chiles states that “Immodestly, I consider myself good with words”, probably not. But it is words that, too often, let him down, the mundane being conveyed to us in a mulch of comfortable, dull, prose. When it comes to rendering the boring interesting Chiles is no Raymond Carver, and not even an awareness of this stops him writing another column about it. 

And yet this doesn’t stop various aspiring writers and commentators making bold claims about his talent: “Britain’s greatest columnist” (Francis Ryan), “the greatest columnist of our time” (Clarissa-Jan Lim), “a national treasure” (Miranda Sawyer). Why would freelance writers heap such praise on Adrian Chiles? Well, perhaps because of who he is married to. And this leads us to the most cynical interpretation of these essays: namely, that Chiles continues to have them published because the Guardian’s editor, Kath Viner, is his wife. This could be true up to a point, except that Chiles had already been commissioned to write for the paper before meeting Viner. And such a cynical interpretation would have to take into account that Chiles’s pieces probably drive more traffic across the Guardian’s website than other writers who have long outlived their shelf-lives, and they also provoke the sort of outrage from writers who are achingly “literary” that say as much about their own limitations as it does about Chiles’s writing technique. 

… it’s like seeing a flowering weed growing at the mouth of an overflowing sewer

It is easy to be cynical, and it is very tempting to write an excoriating review of a collection of essays that are, for the most part, gossamer thin in content and very often instantly forgettable. And yet his description of the death of his father is genuinely moving, and will have resonated with any reader who has lost a parent. There are other descriptions that connect the writer with the reader, and although the prose is limited the tone, often friendly and unpretentious, does enough to make you read on, for a little while at least. Perhaps the most favourable interpretation one can give is that it is no bad thing for a columnist to take as his subject matter events which are determinedly non-political: it’s like seeing a flowering weed growing at the mouth of an overflowing sewer. Whether the Guardian is that sewer, or its sewage, will also depend on how cynical you are.