Not In My Name: a Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy
Julie Burchill and Chas Newkey-Burden
Virgin Books, 208pp, £12.99
Julie Burchill, communist, Thatcherite, anti- interventionist Bush lover that she is, has spent the past two decades maintaining more double standards than John Major's cabinet, so you might have thought that writing a book on hypocrisy wouldn't have posed much of a problem. The "heyday of hypocrisy" when people the world over "vehemently state one thing and then do the exact opposite" sounds like a good fit for a writer who announced last year, in a cackle of publicity, that she was putting down her pen for ever, only to pop up quietly a fortnight later to pen the Sun's Diana anniversary tribute - and whose current tome is up for serialisation in the Daily Mail.
Unfortunately, Not In My Name is not so much money for old rope as money for used dental floss, as Burchill reuses the same stringy ends she's been squeaking between her teeth since the decade when greed was good and hair looked like it had been electrocuted. It's not really a book on hypocrisy, but a book of recycled newspaper columns, cut up into rather over-rehearsed themes. Julie splashes about flinging acid at fat-girl feminists, Islamophiles, chav haters and Catholics as she always has, but this time she doesn't blend it with any panache and the result has all the structure of a Jackson Pollock painting.
Not In My Name seems not so much a no-holds-barred exposure of worldly hypocrisy as a by-product of early-onset dementia. The same old things are repeated for the umpteenth time, irrelevantly and at increasing volume. She takes her cue from a bizarre rota of AOL adverts, films she can't remember the name of, Brighton and Hove Green Party election leaflets, and dead and buried pop songs, and if Burchill does come up with something new it's bound to be because in past decades she would have rejected it as too demented for print. For instance, she blames our "favouring" Arab states over Israel on the "doe-eyed bint" in old Fry's Turkish Delight adverts.
Question marks are wedded to exclamation marks. Cries of "heck" and words she can't be bothered to type out in full ("obvo" for obviously) give the general effect of Glenda Slagg, punctuated not by full stops and commas, but by the sudden injection of "Seat sniffers!" at the end of every sentence. Michelle Pfeiffer's claim, circa 1988, that "I'm not pretty - I look like a duck" gets pulled out from the back of the sock drawer for yet another airing; and a particularly bile-filled passage on poor old Dawn French, whom Burchill has been tormenting since way before The Vicar of Dibley, has been expunged, apparently for being libellous.
In a chapter on strong women, Burchill denounces the "clingy hysteric who sincerely believes that 'You Oughta Know' by Alanis Morissette - the Canadian who, to my ears at least, sounds like a car! - is an anthem for strong women everywhere. D'oh! - It's all about having a nervous breakdown just because some clown's dumped you - what's strong about that!?" This brings up a question that no one, surely, can have thought about for ten years . . . if, that is, they even remember who Alanis Morissette was at all.
And the outraged outer of hypocrites still frequently outs herself, without admitting it. Burchill rages against racist attitudes towards the White Working Class - and then goes on to attack the Polish proles. Savaging old feminists who attack the young women of today in one chapter, Burchill veers off to castigate young women who use vibrators in the next. To denounce a woman for her pursuit of a decent orgasm seems strange, coming from a woman who in the past has loudly congratulated herself for running out on her second husband taking only "two grams of coke, a bust of Lenin and a thong". A-da-go, Julie, those were the days.
Not In My Name is the work of someone who can't be bothered any more. In the concluding chapter Burchill mounts what could be a stinging critique on the green movement, but she bottles it through sheer laziness. "I had planned to end this monster essay with a burst of my trademark pyrotechnics," she writes, but then rehashes a 2007 Sunday Times report instead. Nor are Burchill's deficiencies made up for by her writing partner: Chas Newkey-Burden (funny name, not-a-funny guy), the author of Great Email Disasters, who writes about conversations he's had with random people in bars and stuff he watched on television a while ago.
The joy of reading Burchill used to be that she was a consummate stylist. No matter how wild her rants or how mad her opinions, the reader was always blasted along by the sheer force of her narrative propulsion, her vim, fizz, idiosyncrasy and gunpowder. This is why one fan has set up an online encyclopaedia of everything she's ever written and a detractor has built the Julie Burchill random recycler, in which you can "generate" your own Burchill - because she was so distinctive, and because her flame-throwing columns were so damn readable.
If Julie Burchill had a cult, I would be chief moonie, but Not In My Name is like knocking back the cyanide without the Kool Aid - if you're not a fanatic, why would you? At the end, she foams at the mouth, you foam at the mouth, and the rest is silence.
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