Title: The Perfect Man
Author: David Waller
Date Available: Now
Publisher: Victorian Secrets Ltd
ISBN: 978-1-906469-25-2
Type of cover: Paperback
Pages: 283
It can be awkward reviewing a book by a writer one knows. There is, for instance, a feeling of immediate obligation to read the book rather than skim through it (my personal record for writing a review, from opening the cover to saving the finished product is around 10 minutes) so it’s more time-consuming.
David Waller is a former colleague from my days at the Financial Times Group. I hope to think that if he had written a stinker, I’d have had the guts to say so. But The Perfect Man is nothing if not intriguing. It tells a story I had never heard of, that of Prussian-born Eugen Sandow, strongman, music hall sensation and the epitome of male physical perfection (I postponed reading the book several times because I found the near-nude photographic proof of that last statement off-putting).
Even the introduction to the book is unusually readable, opening the story by dragging readers into the middle of an anecdote about the creator of Sherlock Holmes, famous Scotsman Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Waller quickly sketches out the scene, painting Sandow as a modern gladiator whom society ladies paid good money to access in private after public displays, and as a prefiguring of the kind of brand-building that (Sir) David Beckham and Claudia Schiffer would become well known for.
On this point, I particularly enjoyed the idea that the man who ran personal physical education courses, and developed a chain of licensed fitness training schools, included cigars amongst the products on sale (I smoke cigars regularly myself, and recently completed the Jungfrau Marathon in six hours thirty-one minutes and sixteen seconds at the age of 55, without stopping once, or hitting The Wall).
The introduction also includes a tantalising reference to a Waller family scandal, which of course sent me scurrying straight to the epilogue for details of adulterous love, child abandoment, the Prostitutes’ Padre, loose moral characters, pyjama parties, a clerical defrocking, Skegness Amusement Park, two lions, and the death of the aforementioned padre. Makes you want to read it for yourself, doesn’t it?
