Them

Jon Ronson

Reading "Them", I realised I had seen a couple of the Louis-Theroux-esque documentaries Ronson made in America whose material is reproduced in this book. I think they were Channel 4 pieces broadcast a year or two ago. One was based on the time Ronson spent with the Ku Klux Klan during a time when it was attempting, somewhat laughably, to repackage itself as a kinder, gentler Klan (in the book, the chapter is named The Klansman Who Won't Use The N-Word). The other was a piece in which Ronson succeeds in infiltrating something called the Bilderberg Group/New World Order which supposedly run the whole world without the rest of us realising. No, I'd never heard of them either but apparently it's a conspiracy theory beloved of right-wing America. In fact, Ronson's target (if he can be described as having a target, since his style is quite gentle and not at all smirking) is the right-wing nutters and not the supposed Bilderbergers.

Spicing up the rest of the book are pieces on Omar Bakri Mohammed (a Muslim extremist based in London), American gun nuts, David Icke and Ian Paisley. David Icke is always good value for a smirk (sorry Jon), partly because he is currently warning us all that the world is being run by a depraved cabal descended from lizards and partly because I can remember him presenting BBC sport in pringle sweaters back in the 1980s. The chapter on Omar Bakri Mohammed is perhaps the best chapter of all and I can't better the reviewer who described him in Ronson's book as coming across as "infuriatingly likeable". Worrying, but accurate. There is also a short chapter on the making of the film "American History X". I don't know where it fits into the book's theme but it is supremely entertaining and I guess Ronson couldn't bear to leave it out.

I wonder why Ronson's story focuses so much on American extremists. Perhaps it's just because he is topical but I would have been interested in pieces on people like Le Pen or the BNP. But Americans are what Ronson does best. His piece on Ian Paisley and a dull chapter on Romania don't really work. The Ian Paisley piece is perhaps interesting only because Paisley comes across as the least paradoxical (his belief system is straightforward and in forty years no one has been able to get so much as a cigarette paper, apparently, between his public positions and his private life) and also the least personable of all Ronson's subjects.

But overall, I loved Ronson's style. The faux-naïf observer style is easy enough to do (and it's a crowded field) but Ronson does it brilliantly. And there is more meat than the documentaries (which came across often as lets-all-laugh-at-some-weird-Americans programmes) had led me to expect. There are some genuinely frightening moments and Ronson's reaction is endearingly cowardly. The dialogue is especially nicely done and Ronson winds up each chapter with a comic (or sometimes a sinister and telling) flourish. I was genuinely laughing out loud throughout the book. It also contains the most startling and funniest use of "fuck off" that I have come across in print in a long time.