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HOLIDAYING WITH O'ROURKE

P J O'ROURKE`S Holidays in Hell (Picador 1989) is recommended holiday reading. Whether you're lazing in the land of sun, sand and sangria or shivering in a shelter on a wet and windswept English promenade, you can enjoy a virtual holiday following O'Rourke from Beirut to Belfast via various other venues of murder, massacre and mayhem.

Former Editor of National Lampoon and currently Foreign Affairs Editor for Rolling Stone, he is also the author of such books as Give War a Chance. 'PJ' has the rare, possibly unique, distinction of being "a right-wing satirist".

Holidays In Hell is by now a little dated for the accounts were written between '84 and '88 and some of the world's hotspots have moved on. But PJ is a very witty writer and although sometimes weak or glib, he will have you smiling involuntarily, even if you don't share his gung-ho enthusiasm for US power and the American Way of Life.

PJ is a master of stabbing one-liners: "Commies love concrete, but they don't know how to make it." (page 83).

But PJ doesn't just target East Europeans and Third Worlders. On France, I particularly enjoyed the imagined existentialist conversation about buying croissants, and his reference to the naming of a Paris suburb after Stalingrad "which goes to show that the French have learned nothing about politics since they guillotined all the smart people in 1793." (page 198).

(Having never heard PJ's own voice, I soon found the style of delivery taking on the sound of Clive James!)

PJ has made an art out of calculated insensitivity, but behind the politically incorrect gallows humour and detached callousness, there is a bedrock preference for civilisation, sanity and security - even if you have to kick the shit out of people to get it:

"Western Civilization not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it's also the only thing that's ever tried to." (page 13).

Rik - 18 August 1996