They’d used Swiss bank accounts to convert company finances to cash, then wired it to Bermuda for secret investing. ![]() Fashion labels hiding income in overseas tax havens. The best was a money-laundering yarn with a rag-trade angle. Then a ‘moral outrage’ feature – wild rave parties on sacred Aboriginal land. Words has just changed jobs and is working for an online operation called pry.com but he has brought with him his file of stories he’s especially proud of.įirst a ‘human’ story about ballet dancers overdosing on diuretics. Tabloid journalism is about making people feel angry and superior to evildoers and the stupid, or invoking sentimentality or moral outrage. Sherborne structures his novel so that readers are more likely to be barracking for Emma to give him the heave-ho as fast as she can! No woman reading his litany of self-deception is going to be convinced. He seems genuinely surprised by their estrangement and maintains throughout the novel a naïve optimism that all he has to do is stage-manage various reconciliatory gestures and the marriage will be ok. His idea of self-reflection is to regret his own honesty in telling his wife about it, so that by confessing, the great gesture of being honest would void the sin. This is a man whose religion of family does not preclude a one-night stand with an ad rep – sex of the clothes-on, standing-up kind that no one could call by the wholesome word lovemaking. My asking Ollie to spy was a shameful act for a father, but my religion of family made it dutiful. It requires no thinking – it does the reasoning itself. There is an equation to shame where wrongdoing is converted to rightness. I was doing it for my family-it was worth the cruelty. I enjoyed the kudos of my name beneath headlines on front pages and became used to the heartlessness as if blank inside. Or feigned empathy to the grief-stricken to make copy from their hard-luck stories. I have gatecrashed funerals, linked innocent corpses to local crime syndicates. In the service of which I have knocked on flyscreens and said to mothers of kidnapped toddlers, ‘Don’t you feel guilty for leaving your child in the front yard alone?’ I have shamed them to tears for the photographer. I, Words, am a provider and required to earn wages. believing that the ends justify the means: Here’s Words admitting his tactics while falling prey to what’s called Noble Cause Corruption i.e. The Melbourne Daily Astonisher’) skewers the methodology of tabloid journalists. Sherborne (who used to be a journo for the tabloid ‘Melbourne Sun’ a.k.a. ![]() ![]() Words is alternately brutally honest with himself and self-deluded. He’s a pedantic neat-freak, picky about grammar and tidiness but not above faking outrage stories or making up lies about the man he thinks is wooing his estranged wife. ‘Words’ is a tabloid journalist whose marriage is in trouble. It’s Craig Sherborne’s third novel, following on from The Amateur Science of Love (which I really liked when I reviewed back in 2011) and Tree Palace (2014) which I put on my wishlist but #SmacksForehead forgot to buy.Ĭallum ‘Wordsmith’ Smith, a.k.a. Off the Record is a deliciously droll satire.
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