Hard Work is the story of Polly Toynbee, a journalist who is among other things a Guardian columnist, dropping her moderately comfortable (ie. more high than middle class) life for a while to try and live on minimum wage. The premise is wonderful: urgent, important, and substantial. Unfortunately same cannot be said for the entire book.

But let me assure you that the good moments do greatly outweigh the bad. Her background research is impressive, as it should be with any journalistic work. The descriptions of dispirited workplaces and council flat residents who have given up in all but name are accurate and powerful. But at times Toynbee drifts from describing the problems into proposing answers and that’s where the problems start. The thing I have most problems with isn’t connected to the factual writing but the ideological solutions she proposes. She claims that everybody has the right to cheer themselves up by shopping, that small companies ought to die out (yes, she has good reasons for it but still), and other views which don’t nicely fit mine. But then again that might be just me.

Ultimately I feel that Toynbee’s work has a certain mentality best articulated by Jarvis Cocker in Common People: ”You will never understand […] If you called your dad he could stop it all”. Toynbee is the first one to acknowledge this but in my opinion she doesn’t get away with it. The ending of the book with her thanking her lucky stars just emphasizes it. Incidentally the development of the theme bears some resemblance to Hornby’s How To Be Good where the middle-class protagonists try to alleviate their guilt over other’s suffering but ultimately they just fall back on their lives with nothing changed. And I know I’m just being terribly moralistic and naive but it doesn’t make me feel right.