The polarisation of scores for this book

[Marco]

Many readers awarding five-stars to 'The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair' (TTATHQA) have declared themselves perplexed by the number of reviewers, myself included, awarding just one star to the same work. Some have asked whether I, with my vast knowledge of literary matters, can shed light upon this polarisation of opinion.

The cause is medical. There is a disease, more suffered than understood, which afflicts about one person in every 83; a disease of such stigmatising impact that its sufferers shrink from discussing it; a disease that it is my painful duty now to describe. I hope my revelations will evoke pity and understanding among those to whom the existence of the disease has been unknown until now.

I and my fellow sufferers experience a collection of symptoms which is unrecognised by the mainstream medical community, but is known to specialists as Ocram’s Syndrome.

The symptoms of Ocram's amount to an irrational and debilitating intolerance that denies the sufferer the simple pleasure of reading best-sellers. The symptoms are too many to list exhaustively here, but some of the more common can be described with reference to TTATHQA, as follows:


When we see a sentence such as ‘She collapsed to the ground’ we cannot accept it and pass-on. Just because the words 'to the ground' are redundant, we have an irrepressible urge to expunge them, leaving just ‘She collapsed’, which to our tormented and deranged minds seems clearer and shorter.


When we read such a metaphor as ‘I felt like a volcano waking up and preparing to erupt’, the dreadful mental tic repeats its corrosive effects on our judgement of the book. Volcanoes don’t ‘prepare’, says the little devil-voice in our head. How can volcanoes make preparations? And anyway, the voice says, it should be a volcano waking, not a volcano waking up.


A shortage of anaphase-II inhibitors at synaptic junctions causes our brains to interpret everyday scenarios as laughably improbable, scenarios such as a writer being mobbed in the street by people with gnawing questions about his book. Ha! our unbalanced minds say. Just as if.


When a professor of literature says ‘if you can go for a run in the rain then you can write a great book’ our sick and distorted minds raise absurd and spurious objections. Surely, we say, there must be other conditions to be satisfied. Surely some facility with language is needed, some rudimentary creative urge, some tendency to reflect and self-criticise… on and on we go.


The dreadful psychosis manifests again when the professor says that writing a book is exactly like a boxing match. Our afflicted minds can conceive perhaps some partial tenuous analogy between writing and boxing, but we are unable to recognise that writing and boxing are exactly the same.


And when a phrase or plot-device appears which has been used millions of times before, we cannot recognise its classic status, and instead our twisted minds react as if it were a cliché.

Hopefully those few examples of the many symptoms of Ocram’s Syndrome are sufficient to indicate its debilitating impact. While the non-sufferer can cheerfully read to the end of TTATHQA, we sufferers can barely reach page three before our sympathetic carers have to administer the tranquilisers, wheel us to our padded cell, check there are no Dan Browns under the bed, and lock us in until we recover from the attack.

Hopefully you will now understand that a one-star rating for a popular best-seller is not intended as a criticism; instead it is a health warning to the sufferers of Ocram’s, much as symbols on menus highlight dangers to those with food intolerances.


I can also announce that ever since I first identified the syndrome that now bears my name, researchers have been working night and day to develop solutions to lessen its impact. One approach showing promise in the labs is a specialist technique known as ‘editing’. Trials suggest that as little as a person-month of 'editing' might eliminate the triggers of Ocram’s in a work such as TTATHQA. Of course it will be many years before these early trials might lead to the eradication of the disease. The barriers to overcome are not just medical- the harsh and rapacious publishing industry- which is to Ocram’s what the tobacco industry has been to cancer- will need to be tackled, and I see little hope of early success in that endeavour.

[Jood]

Brilliant Marco - now I can put a name to my disease!

[Thomas]

I think in this case my Ocram's symptoms were compounded by my stupidpaperthincharactersitis and my whyisnobodyinvestigatingosis.