Getting real
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You know something authentic is important when multinational corporations spend millions trying to fake it. That's the insight of this book. It shows in case after case how big business is playing catch-up with people's desire for a real connection with the world around them - but never quite 'gets it.' The reason, it seems, is that the failed markets presided over by our age's corporate leviathans are culturally innoculated by their own business models from the real world. Their executives float above us in glass-walled office suites, business class flights and five star hotels and make decisions that roll out goods and services identically around the world, virtually regardless of local place and context. Meanwhile, the modern backlash, the quest for the real and authentic, is being met by individual artists, entrepeneurs and community activists who've never been inside a boardroom. What makes the book so enjoyable is that Boyle is a great story teller. And, like the best, he loves his characters and empathises with their world. What also comes through is that the author is not just an observer. His insights come from someone who also actually 'does things' at the local level. Reading authenticity is like being released into fresh air from a room where you have been suffocated by commercial fakery, lies and corporate desperation - a place where men in suits pursuade you of your own inadequacy, and then promptly sell you an answer to it. So, feel the breeze, buy the book.
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Reasonable thesis, poorly executed
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Boyle's central argument, for a future based on appreciation of the "authentic" (yes, the inverted commas raise yet skirt an issue), is interesting but sadly mired in typographical and factual errors. His prose is hedged - replete with extraneous, journalistic dashes - and lazily researched; the reader will learn nothing new from what is, essentially, a cobbled together rehearsal of now trite mass-cultural critiques, from those diatribes beloved of the Franfurt School to Naomi Klein's more impassioned No Logo, which is all-too-obvious template. I'm sure there is a great disquisition to be written on the subject, but this undergrad-style, pat re-tread is sadly not it.
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Deadeningly Earnest
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With all the humourless self-satisfaction of the eternally right, David Boyle launches into a confused yarn about authenticity, and the tone remains self-satisfied, rather than satisfying throughout this earnest and meandering work.
This is not a dreadful book, in fact it has a number of useful and interesting examples in it. But it is a very poor take on a fascinating and important phenomenon, and there are too many examples that are asserted rather than argued. The success of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings etc. does not herald an escape into fantasy, apparently, but a reassertion of reality. Why? Because he has a quote to hand that says that storytelling is always about reality, that's why.
If you're happy to pick and choose, then you'll find much to use in here. If you want to be involved in an argument that you believe and feel you can add to, I fear you'll find that Boyle's tone and sudden assertions of fact are off-putting and distancing.
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A witty and wise book
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I read this book six months ago and it's ideas keep intriguing me. DB puts his finger on many modern dissatisfactions and contrasts them with some of the deepest yearnings. Stories about how Keith Joseph, Mrs Thatcher's grey eminence, spent years trying to get hold of the levers of power, only to discover they weren't connected to anything, amuse and instruct. Thoroughly recommended for politicians looking for ideas to shape the C21st and lay people who want someone to articulate their aspirations.
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genuinely good read
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I strongly recommend this if you're dubious about fake food, culture and politics. You'll feel as though you've been on a real whirlwind tour around consumer-mad Britain, France, the USA and Japan, accompanied by an astute and irreverent guide. The author is definely on to something with the New Realists, but doesn't preach. If David Boyle didn't exist, we'd have to invent him. Excellent.
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