It’s taken a while for people to actually read the sodding thing, but, having done so, some of them are revising their initial opinions.
I think we can take this piece in the Wall Street Journal as the definitive review, thus saving all of us a lot of time and money:
However, I have since doubled back to the beginning and started reading the book from scratch. Having done so, and got a couple of hundred pages in, I am undergoing a rethink based on what I have discovered. It really is a not very good book. ’A Journey’ is not just badly written; for long stretches it is virtually unreadable.
A colleague, partly encouraged by my earlier positive comments based on that first run through, has this to say having wasted many hours of his spare time:
“Astonishing levels of self-absorption in the last few chapters – and written like a teenage girl’s diary, an endless, unexpurgated, repetitive stream of consciousness. The section about his relationship with the British people, full of amateur psychobabble, made me want to vomit. He is clearly still devastated by his loss of office, utterly deluded as to why it happened, and desperate to get back. It must be the most pathetic and undignified book ever written by a former prime minister. By the end, I almost felt sorry for him. I think you owe readers of your blog a correction!”
