Was it some early trauma that made AA Gill the razor-tongued, Hatchet Job of the Year-winning critic he is today? In his acceptance speech he revealed the piteous story of how his first, and only, novel was received by the critics. “The headline, before the review even started, was ‘Do not buy this book’.”
The Londoner, with the help of The Omnivore magazine, has truffled around and found the original 1996 hatchet job by the Guardian’s Nicholas Lezard: “When a publisher claims that a certain author is going to be ‘The Tom Sharpe of the Nineties’, it is a sign that someone has his or her back to the wall, at the sharp edge of the divide between lack of literary merit and the hope of large sales.” It was a “dismal book, whose plot is too tedious to summarise” and Lezard ended by calling Gill “a w**ker”.
“I must say it rather set the standard for hatchet jobs at the time,” Lezard modestly recalls.
