The Hack's Tale, by David Hughes

When nature calls on the Pilgrim's Way

David Hughes hates the media. He regularly finds himself "...half-blinded by the daily haze of news and comment in print, on screen... trapped under my own roof in worldwide thickets of bulletins, misted by rumours, foghorned by headlines..." His hatred is such that he decides to "get out and about" to find out "who started the rot".

David Hughes hates the media. He regularly finds himself "...half-blinded by the daily haze of news and comment in print, on screen... trapped under my own roof in worldwide thickets of bulletins, misted by rumours, foghorned by headlines..." His hatred is such that he decides to "get out and about" to find out "who started the rot".

Hughes does not define "the media" or qualify the term (it's not the mass media, or even the Western media, so one has to assume that it includes every form of communication in the world). He does not reference even the most basic of texts on the subject. Barthes, McLuhan, Chomsky or Baudrillard could have perhaps hardened his critical response into something beyond "I don't like this." Derrida may even have comforted him. (After all, why wouldn't the media lie? Language itself tells lies.) Instead, armed with memories of studying The Canterbury Tales at school (and a commission for this book), Hughes decides to search out the men behind the media, a trio of 14th century writers: Chaucer, Froissart and Boccaccio.

However, the lead character here is Hughes himself, with his "dicky ankle" and his Renault Clio. As he scrambles around Europe, this feels more like a display of contemporary middle-English absurdity than a book about the media or 14th-century writing. After a booze cruise to France he remarks: "All day I have been free of the media ... I have been at sea." How nice to be part of a class of people who can escape the news by travelling somewhere where it doesn't happen (to them). Most of the people who appear in the news stories that Hughes dismisses as "lies" (the victims of war, the raped, the murdered) would not have had that choice.

At one point, he visits The Canterbury Tales, a multimedia experience full of French schoolchildren. On leaving, he sees some men reading "frightening" newspapers in a library. "I feel the simple satisfaction of having been to 1382 and come back alive," he says. On a Greek island, he pockets some fragments of a mosaic. "Just as I am stealing from a culture not my own, Chaucer stole from such foreign writers as Boccaccio." Most bizarrely of all, Hughes feels the call of nature on the Pilgrim's Way. "Unzipping against a dry-twigged hedge, I focus on the relief as the eyes blink at the view: a good slash makes the world kin, I am a pilgrim, I am the poet, I am there as well as here. The cloudscape swirls over me then as it does now." This is the problem with personal-quest narratives. Pissing against a hedge on the Pilgrim's Way does not make you Chaucer.

"Moving towards the autoroute I try to dredge up Froissart in memory. There is not a lot there," Hughes admits. "Ignorance is bliss to the imagination." Maybe, but it's not so useful when you're writing a book. Here motorway junctions, dates and events are spewed out as if from a random generator. Easy to write. Not so easy to read.

There are some interesting moments, but on the whole, this semi-surreal project of fading in and out between his experience ("... the waiter places a veal chop in front of me") and his memories of what he has read about Chaucer et al, does not work. The tone is pompous. On a ferry, women "as raucous as seagulls" discuss last night's episode of a soap. In a restaurant in Calais, customers sit like "dummies in a window display". On an Aegean cruise, passengers are "put out to shop".

By the end, the dicky ankle, the best character in this book, has been operated on (privately). While Hughes recuperates we finally get a clue to what, exactly, comprises this "media" he so despises. He is "draped in the Sun, wrapped in the Mail, buried in the Telegraph, suffocated by The Times". And then it all makes sense. If this is your experience of what the media is, perhaps escape is the only option.