Two years ago, before the financial world fell to its knees, Laurence Shorter believed things had become as bad as they could get. Each morning, the Today programme pumped negativity straight into his bedroom - environmental collapse, disease, failing oil supplies, religious fanaticism - and he resolved to do something about it. He knew he wasn't alone; everyone felt bad, it was the fault of consumerism and corrupted western values. He had the sudden revelation that one person could stand up and make a difference and that Bono's energy was flagging.
Today programme pumped negativity straight into his bedroom - environmental collapse, disease, failing oil supplies, religious fanaticism - and he resolved to do something about it. He knew he wasn't alone; everyone felt bad, it was the fault of consumerism and corrupted western values. He had the sudden revelation that one person could stand up and make a difference and that Bono's energy was flagging.
Pitched somewhere between Danny Wallace's Yes Man and Jeremy Gilley's Peace One Day project, The Optimist is a quest to understand how we might feel more positive about the human condition. Shorter engages briefly with the literature of hope and self-help, dabbles in spiritualism and eastern mysticism and embarks on setpiece confrontations with experts and the famous. He snatches brief interviews with a cigar-chewing Tim Smit at the Eden Project, a bitter Harold Pinter at a summer birthday party, and a realistic Desmond Tutu at the wheel of his BMW in Cape Town. He even manages a running conversation with a nervous Mick Jagger in a park.
Shorter is a snappy writer - fast, compelling, sympathetic and seemingly honest - but his book is a one-gag stand-up routine that places the rewards of a quick fix above the pleasures of deeper self-discovery. He wants to be an achiever like the people he interviews, but he settles for the possibility of his quest turning into a TV programme. The Optimist is not a useful book, and not an hilarious one, but it may make you feel temporarily better about the expansive global traumas of life. Shorter's wisest critic turns out to be his dad, with whom he agrees upon a Douglas Adams-style conclusion: things aren't too bad after all, so long as you get enough sleep and don't drink on an empty stomach.
