A little goes a long way
Andro Linklater
THE iMPORTANCE OF BEiNG TRiviAL by Mark Mason Random House, £12.99, pp. 304, ISBN 9781847945174 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 No book can be entirely bad that tells you a zebra is basically black with up to 250 white stripes, that Princess Diana’s colonic irrigation treatment required ten gallons of water or that the height of the Eiffel Tower grows seven inches during a normal summer (although in this one it has probably shrunk). So many of life’s minor pleasures are contained in the ivvy words — frivolity, privies, rivers, trivets, vivacity, privilege, to name an immediate few — it is no surprise to find an entire book devoted to triviality. A shelf might seem about right for such a subject. But in fact, if all the publications associated with quizzes, lists, useless information, strange achievements and bizarre phenomena were put together, trivia books would fill a warehouse, and the prototype, The Guinness Book of Records, sells three million copies annually. Which is where Mark Mason steps in. Triviality, he declares like a fashion editor insisting that white is this season’s black, is the new importance.
At first, this seems the basis for a rather stylish practical joke, as though calling football ‘the beautiful game’ justified a campaign to have Inverurie Loco Works play their next fixture with Forres Mechanics at the Museum of Modern Art. Mason duly records pages of earnest conversation with trivia-loving friends, celebrities and psychologists in which they agree that although a delight in triviality is largely confined to males and masculinethinking females — ‘It’s part of “bloke equipment” ’ says John Sessions — it is significant because it throws light on the way we (or perhaps only men and MTFs) perceive the world and relate to one another.
But rather than having fun with this idea, it soon becomes clear that Mason is deadly serious. The result is like listening to a meeting of Anoraks Anonymous. Trivialists, it seems, are addicts whose lives would be sad, lonely and boring without the stimulus of an endless supply of bizarre facts. These can be traded with other addicts in place of the emotional exchanges that normally come with friendliness and love. In the book, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert in autism, has a riff on people with Asperger’s syndrome that sounds horribly like some of the people Mason has been interviewing:
As a group they are more likely to suffer from being aware that they’re different. They’re trying to make friends and hold on to relationships, but may get it wrong because of the empathy difficulties.
As the interviewer, Mason himself appears both likeable and vulnerable. He admits that
with no religous belief to cling to, I view life as essentially meaningless. On a good day my mind translates this as ‘Enjoy life for what it is’, allowing me to wade happily about in trivia.
On a bad day, he sounds desperate.
Yet, however sympathetic the author, it’s difficult not to feel that The Importance of Being Trivial is the outcome of muddled thinking. The disconnected information that counts as trivia is inherently meaningless. Facts acquire their value from their context. Without it, the existence of the Holocaust is neither more nor less significant than the three vaginas of a female kangaroo. In itself this reservoir of value-free, meaningless information is utterly unimportant; what does deserve study is its vast and accelerating popularity. In part it has spread with the growth of the gigantic entertainment industry, but some of trivia’s appeal must spring from the increasingly alienated way in which information is discovered and passed on in childhood. Once, bizarre facts came from other people in stories and games and secrets, replete with emotion and imagination; now they are provided in isolation with the disembodied authority of Wikipedia or the theatrical confidences of Facebook.
To the growing number of trivialists, I suspect this book may be fascinating. For my part, it triggered the sort of reaction that the classic marketing slogan for Strand cigarettes, ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’, was supposed to have had on its audience. What sort of misfit wants to be alone with a fact?
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