There’s a porpoise close behind us

Michael Dobson

• The Origins of English Nonsense by Noel Malcolm
  HarperCollins, 329 pp, £18.00, May 1997, ISBN 0 00 255827 0

How far could, or even should, a history of nonsense make sense? This is one of the questions raised by Noel Malcolm’s study of English nonsense verse – a book which is itself, appropriately, an apparent sport in a career otherwise devoted to Hobbes’s letters and the geopolitics of the Balkans. Perhaps only an author raised on Leviathan and hardened by the experience of publishing something as contentious as Bosnia: A Short History would have the nerve to attempt the task of trying to write cogently about the battiest literary treasures of the English Renaissance. This is an anthology of 17th-century poems which were specifically designed to frustrate and render ludicrous all the normal procedures of reading. That Malcolm’s introductory essay manages to be intelligent about these exhilaratingly daft texts without sounding solemn, pedantic or twee is itself an achievement.