Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure

Dave Gorman

I bought this one on ebay and the postman pushed the package through the catflap instead of knocking on the door. As a result the dog chewed it half to bits before I could get to it. And once I started reading it, it didn't get any better. Because of the dog damage to the cover, the Evening Standard's blurb "A beautiful picaresque tale etc" now looks as if it reads "A pitiful etc". Which is just about right.

I had high hopes of this after seeing the author's "Are You Dave Gorman" show and thinking I'd stumbled across a performer with a rare talent for the absurd. Apparently Dave Gorman wrote Googlewhack Adventure while burning his way through a publisher's advance (for a proper book) on the back of his "Are You ." success. Stuck for material for his planned novel he started to get interested in Googlewhacks (that's when you put two words into Google and only get 1 result, usually achieved by choos ing an unlikely pairing, like "mastitis" and "avocado"). By visiting a site's owner and asking him to nominate a new Googlewhack Gorman reckoned he'd meet an amusing succession of people running obscure websites.

Now I'm all for comedians who manage to turn a silly quest into a humorous read (we're talking Tony Hawks territory) but this one is more dreary than daft. What should be characterised by charming serendipity is made dull by the random and pointless nature of the challenge. The joke of having to explain Googlewhacking to the uninitiated each time he meets a new victim (without making it sound like masturbation, ha ha) wears thin very fast (and it wasn't a great joke to start with).

If an author admits the book you're currently reading is his displacement activity for the book he should have been writing then the he has to make damn sure it's half decent. Instead, throwing in a lame dream sequence (p.107 all the way through to p.111) is perhaps the book's lowest point.

Peculiarly enough, before we get to the tedious Googlewhacking stuff, the book does contain a seriously funny first chapter describing how the advance was secured. The story of his pitch to the publishers is well told. It's almost a pity the novel (whose premise and plot sound rather appealing) never got written.