Society: Lynne Truss fails to do for bad manners what she did for bad punctuation, writes Robert O'Byrne
Not long ago, a caller to one of RTÉ Radio's interminable chat shows actually proffered some sensible advice. She suggested that after paying for groceries, shoppers should remove all fruit, vegetables and the like from the polystyrene trays and plastic bags and cling film wrappings and leave the supermarket to dispose of this unnecessary and wasteful detritus.
I suspect the idea would meet with Lynne Truss's approval because goodness knows not a lot else about contemporary life does. Among the activities that incur her especial wrath are talking in cinemas, cigarette smoking (oddly enough, especially outdoors), children skateboarding on pavements, cyclists jumping lights and littering. Perversely, she is untroubled by commuters who tell the recipient of a mobile phone call, "I'm on the train", although she rather wishes they'd show greater imagination.
This tolerance towards mobile phones and their users proves to be an exception in Talk to the Hand, which, with an honesty rare among publishers, is summarised on the dust jacket as "a big rant, essentially". It's an amusing rant and Truss knows how to deliver a good anecdote, but after 100 pages or so the fulminating starts to grow a little wearisome, as though the author fancied herself the successor to Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network. What would have made an entertaining series of newspaper columns has been permitted to catch a bad dose of elephantiasis.
It needn't have been so, had Truss not declared her disinclination to be prescriptive. There may be, as she argues, already far too many books snootily instructing the reader how to behave in any imaginable social situation, but at least their authors have made an effort to find a solution to the illness of bad manners. Truss, on the other hand, satisfies herself with describing the symptoms rather than troubling to propose a cure.
Therein lies the difference between Talk to the Hand and her previous success, Eats, Shoots and Leaves. While that work was also something of a rant - against bad punctuation - it also contained practical advice on the function of a semicolon and the correct use of the apostrophe. This time, however, when Truss asks "What can be done?" about the avalanche of rudeness that threatens to overwhelm us, her unhelpful answer is, "Well, ha ha, search me". To which the only polite response must be, "No thanks".
A characteristic of any decent tirade is its want of logicality and that's true of Truss's outburst. At one point, for example, she theorises that as consumers we are now swamped by excessive choice but then insists that when it comes to finding information on the internet we are not, after all, presented with choice. Instead, "we can pick and choose only from what is offered . . . In fact, what we do is select." Perhaps some time has passed since Truss last visited a library or shop or any other amenity but she would find much the same circumstances prevail in these places too. And in any case, it's difficult to see what the advent of Google has to do with rudeness.
Similarly, within a few pages, she manages to lament the decline of civility in everyday exchanges and then pronounce her disapproval of immoderate courteousness of the American "Have a nice day" variety. Owing to her non-prescriptive rule, it's impossible to understand what she'd like instead of those two extremes. A lot of Talk to the Hand reads as though its author were conducting a heated debate with herself and hadn't reached any conclusions.
Which isn't to decry the debate's merits. Truss is right to lament the loss of common courtesy, the decline of personal responsibility, the widespread assumption that someone else will pick up the litter/tab/phone, the general disappearance of good parenting and the evolution of a selfish, disruptive, greedy populace clutching an iPod in one fist and a can of cheap lager in the other. She is wrong to imagine that this is an exclusively English phenomenon and that the French are invariably polite when shopping. Society today is confused and contradictory and chaotic. It was probably ever thus, which is precisely why advice on good behaviour has always been sought and given, the latter sometimes even without a request. What has also not altered is that every generation believes the passing of time has brought an irreversible lowering of standards. Lynne Truss may be, as she claims in her introduction, "so young and fresh and liberal and everything" but her rant is likely to appeal to an audience who are none of those things.
Robert O'Byrne is a writer and journalist. His most recent book is Mind Your Manners: A Guide to Good Behaviour (Sitric Press)
Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door). By Lynne Truss, Profile Books, 214pp. £9.99