PJ O'Rourke, Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader: 'satirical essays could be a dying form', book review

In its 844 pages are his most-requested pieces, which have previously appeared in best sellers like 'Holidays In Hell'

Author P.J. O'Rourke (Getty Images)

This house brick-sized tome is the heftiest I've handled since somebody presented me with the collected golfing stories of PG Wodehouse many years ago.

It's got a similar all-human-life-is-there illustrated cover. Open it in the middle and there’s even a piece from 1992 about the joys of golf in which O’Rourke observes that “hitting things with a stick is the cornerstone of civilisation”.

Like Wodehouse, O’Rourke fashions his one-liners to climax in a bathetic honk.

Bianca Jagger is condemned to the lonely hell of the formerly cute. A Lebanese showing you his gun is like an Englishwoman showing you her roses. The Ottoman Empire was so-called because it was governed by someone with the brains of a footstool.

In its 844 pages are his most-requested pieces, which have previously appeared in best sellers like Holidays In Hell, Republican Party Reptile, Parliament Of Whores and Give War A Chance. O’Rourke had first mover advantage back in the eighties. He was the only member of Woodstock Nation smart enough to brand himself as a conservative, or “Cro-Magnon Republican”, as he puts it. God is a Republican, he says, while Santa Claus is a Democrat.

From that position he is free to travel the world, allowing his gimlet eye to alight on the things that people do as opposed to the things they say they do. In the Balkans he observes that what divides the Serbs from the Croats is the different religions which they don’t follow.

In Washington on September 11th he notices that the smart set were making reservations in the lobbyists’ favourite restaurant only ten minutes after the plane had hit the Pentagon.

There is no immigration section at Albania’s main airport for the sound reason that nobody is trying to get in. In 1991 he reports from Somalia where he finds that it’s impossible to bring in wheat for the starving but somehow twenty plane loads of qat are flown in every day to keep the soldiery stoned.

The true measure of the failure of Communism, he declares, is it even managed to make a poor country out of a nation full of Germans.

It’s not all travel and trouble. Like all men who came to fatherhood late he finds a whole new continent of shock and awe in the experience. “Babies comes from *there*?! Whole babies. Head and everything? Ouch.” Sometimes he writes like Jack Nicholson acts - as if there’s grim amusement to be mined from everything. He says he actually became a conservative in 1997 when his first child was born. “Suddenly I was an opponent of change,” he says.

You probably won’t read this kind of thing in the future. Many of the places O’Rourke reported on back in the 80s and 90s are now even more dangerous. Some of them, like the former East Berlin, are now full of expensive shops.

If foreign correspondents are killed today it’s less likely to be by mistake. A lot of these features were probably commissioned by editors who suspected that while these might not be the opinions that their readers would be happy to proclaim they would nonetheless be the ones they held.

The advertising which once paid for this kind of magazine journalism (and in the case of his 1988 Ramble Through Lebanon, was sufficiently reliable for Vanity Fair to commission him and then not run the piece) is gone and the big humorous essay or sprawling colour piece has atomised into countless memes, GIFs and 140-character asides.

In the near future nobody will have the patience to read this kind of stuff, which is a good job because nobody will have the budget to write it.

Like the Wodehouse golf book, O’Rourke’s career omnibus is best enjoyed from the depths of a button back chair with a glass of something golden at your side. Since the book is impossible to lift, the chair should be a stout one.

Thrown Under The Omnibus: A Reader, by P.J. O’Rourke. Grove Press, £20