The Castle - Jon Ronson ****

By Brian Clegg

I have always enjoyed the work of Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux, including their use of blatant faux nativity (I’ll come back to this) – at one time they were rivals, though Theroux has stuck with TV (and gone a little of the rails by moving away from more entertaining stories to pure unpleasantness), while Ronson has become the master of this kind of journalistic book, exploring the oddities of human nature.

He became famous with The Men Who Stare at Goats, but for me his zenith (so far) has been The Psychopath Test. I wasn’t sure what to make of The Castle: it lacks the clear central concept of his best books, but is described in the subtitle as being about ‘unravelling men’. The central character is Chris Mark, a rich man with mental issues who attempts to encourage women to his fake castle, seeming to model himself on Hugh Hefner. 

However, other characters also emerge with different characteristics. Ronson’s main theme seems to be men who can’t find a real purpose in life, like Mark or YouTube influencers – but also includes, for example, the writer Graham Linehan, the man behind Father Ted and the IT Crowd, whose legitimate concerns about women’s safety and safe spaces seemed to have spiralled into a noxious relationship with the world. Even Ronson himself comes to an extent under his own microscope when he finds himself alone on his wedding anniversary, trying to follow a lead rather than being with his wife.

Ronson always puts more of himself into his work than Theroux – and he does seem to a degree to be one of the ‘unravelling men’ he is analysing. I wrote the words ‘faux naivety’ about Ronson and Theroux above before I came to a point in the book where Ronson says this term has been applied to them, apparently suggesting that Theroux is guilty of this in a way that Ronson isn’t. In fact there’s quite a bit of Ronson’s own unravelling when you look at the detail – for example after some reasonable concerns about Linehan, Ronson delivers a quite vicious swipe at his former friend.

The reality is that Ronson’s writing oozes with his personality in both positive and negative aspects – it’s part of his appeal. While not one of his best books (and I think, for instance, he could acknowledge more that Linehan’s gender critical stance was a reasonable one before his descent into extreme reactions) it is nevertheless an interesting view of the nature of the difficult existence many now face, particularly in the US. 

You can buy The Castle from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com or Bookshop.org

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.