I would not like to be interviewed by Joe O'Connor. On a good day, no doubt, he could be a sensitive enough New Age columnist. But he is certainly capable of skulking around the loo in an interviewee's house, getting juicy details on the victim from the medicine cabinet.
Of course, if it is not one's own meanness with the toilet roll that is being investigated, it can make for good reading. In this collection of columns, mainly reprinted from Dublin's Sunday Tribune, a visit to Jeffrey Archer's penthouse London apartment produces an amusing but cruel account of the novelist/politician, whose literary penchant for the clapped-out cliche O'Connor is merciless in mocking.
'The hours turned into days, the days into weeks, the weeks into . . .? You guessed it. Months. What is the hero's friend as good as? His word. What do crime reporters turn up to work in? Their hordes.' O'Connor - who is a novelist as well as a satirist - is the brother of Sinead, which is not something he writes about. He does write about a lot of other things, however, including impersonating Santa Claus in a department store, not managing to make a deposit at a sperm bank and managing to pass his driving test.
Sex features frequently, although mostly in the knock-kneed sense that British and Irish comedians (and citizens) seem to favour so much.
He is mostly self-effacing, mostly charming, and often witty. However, his penchant for the exaggerated description is probably more fitted to the short bursts of the weekly columns for which many of these pieces were originally composed, than to the uninterrupted reading that this compilation book offers.
Although it would be inadvisable to be on the other side of O'Connor's tape recorder, he would probably be a good person to go for a drink with - as long as he did not take too much time retelling the Monty Python parrot sketch or that one about matchboxes on the motorway. O'Connor can not only tell a good story, he is capable at times of a touching honesty.