Wendy Holden is made to laugh and cry by the pick of 2005's bog reads
A far more important social signifier than IQ these days is LQ - the number of lavatories you have in your house. Two is the middle-class rock bottom; those with "en suite" bathrooms as well as downstairs "cloakrooms" might clock up three. Those who possess second homes, meanwhile, could be looking at four or even five.
Given this state of affairs, it is fortunate that in our age the literary genre known as "bog books" has reached its supreme expression, much as painting did in mid-15th-century Florence. Perhaps this will be what our time is remembered for - even if, inexplicably, the genre has yet to be awarded its own corner in Waterstone's.
To call a volume a bog book is no slight. People commonly use the thunderbox (the downstairs one, normally) to display everything that they are secretly most proud of, such as their Oxbridge Matriculation line-up and letters from eminent persons. Starring in my own downstairs convenience is a missive from Biddy Baxter praising my entry to the Blue Peter Royal Wedding Plate Design competition. This invariably excites comment from users, particularly the ones who have worked out that in 1981 I was a (highly embarrassing) 16.
But the point remains that the most interesting books in the house invariably gravitate to the loo, especially any vol-ume of a bitty, witty nature consisting of short chapters, lists, and so on. Hermione Eyre and William Donaldson's Dictionary of National Celebrity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) fits this profile perfectly. It is meant to be a satirical counterpoint to such catalogues of national distinction as Debrett's People of Today. Its ostensible purpose is pinpointing those whose fame seems wildly disproportionate to their abilities, if not their assets: the inflatable likes of Jodie Marsh, Jordan et al are amusingly pilloried. So far, so very sharp and well written. Yet this espousal of the new, celebrity-irreverent, "is everything crap or is it me" zeitgeist only goes so far: while soft-target members of boy-bands are dismissed as "dolts", power-brokers such as Richard Branson ("Thatcherism in a comfy cardy") get an easier ride. Great fun none the less.
Dead Pets by Sam Leith (Canongate) is a sort of Dictionary of National Celebrity Pets - a series of lives (and deaths) of the animal companions of Hitler, Thomas Hardy, Byron and Jeremy Thorpe, among others. This main action is interspersed with forays into the Waugh-esque territory of animal cemeteries, a little light taxidermy and some dead-animal recipes (roast guinea pig in peanut sauce, anyone?). The ingredient transforming what could easily have been yet another sop to the Christmas animal-loving market is Leith himself. There is a super-exuberance and irrepressible erudition to his writing; his highly developed sense of the absurd is matched only by his exaggerated sense of pathos. His account of the death of Silky, his hamster, is as hilarious as it is moving.
Leith's subtext is the way human nature is revealed through our interaction with animals. Hyde Park Gate News, edited by Gill Lowe (Hesperus), is, on the face of it, a compilation of the weekly snippety "newspaper" chronicling family life at 22 Hyde Park Gate during the 1890s, work of the young Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) and her siblings. Yet what lies beneath is a fascinating canine sub-plot. In and among the precocious and amus-ing outpourings of three clever children desperate to impress their parents (has anything chan-ged in Kensington?), the following stories emerge. The children's mother, the rather glamorous and wafting Julia Stephen, was most unethereally obsessed with a large and noisy dog down the road, whose owners she eventually prosecuted. There is also the episode when the young Stephens joyously discover, in the street outside their house, an abandoned puppy, which they bring home - "he ran in . . . as if he had lived there for many years", Virginia records. Not for long, he didn't. A week or so later Julia threw the dog back on to the streets; "grief like a thunder-clap", Virginia sadly writes. And yet, just a few weeks after this anguished parting, Julia decides she wants a dog after all, and the rather memorably named Shag now appears on the scene. One wonders what a mother capable of being so cavalier with something as important as her children's dog was doing to their minds.
Impossible Journeys (Cadogan) could not be further removed from the enclosed, gloomy atmosphere of 22 Hyde Park Gate. Obviously a labour of love by its author, Mathew Lyons, it describes a series of weird and wonderful long-distance trips by travellers through the centuries. There are many human dramas, the most cataclysmic being Walter Raleigh's pursuit of El Dorado, the legendary city of gold with which he was obsessed. In chasing it, he lost something far more precious: his son Wat, shot in the throat in a skirmish with the locals. Lyons's account is truly heartbreaking, as is the letter Raleigh writes to his wife to give her the news.
Not everything in bog books is funny, but one of the great things about loos is that no one can see you cry.
Wendy Holden's latest novel is The Wives of Bath (Headline)
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