After more than 25 years as a consultant urologist in Holland, Mels van Driel's passion for his work remains undiminished. As does his taste for making bawdy quibbles about it. "In the last few decades," he sniggers on page one, "tens of thousands of penises and testicles have been through my hands." Which makes him just the man to write this lighthearted gambol through the uses and abuses of the penis and its unjustly overlooked companion organs.
And yet, even when one has finished the task of absolving him and his translator from their many sins of style and punctuation, Van Driel's book remains, by any normal measure, a botched job. "I lay absolutely no claim to completeness or scholarly rigour," he announces at the outset, though most readers could have worked this out for themselves. Where, for instance, is the section on venereal disease? Why is there almost nothing on the penis's most frequent function, as a conduit of urine?
And as for rigour, well I am no urologist, but I do doubt whether researchers really found that the "average diameter of the fully erect penis was approximately 121mm". That is nearly five inches or about the same size, in cross section, as a compact disc. A simple mistake, I'm sure, substituting diameter for circumference, but such things ought to matter in this book.
As should the author's credibility. Yet Van Driel undermines himself badly by straying into the kind of breezy generalising that ought to be beneath the dignity of a scientist. "Urologists have the reputation of being the most intelligent of all surgical specialists," he tells us with a straight face. (Do they really? I hear the rest of the profession asking.) But worse than these deficiencies is the fact that Manhood has no discernible purpose, no thrust. The cover's (rather funny) promise of a tale of "Rise and Fall" is misleading; the penis, as depicted here, is quite without an arc. Every chapter seems unconnected with its neighbour, as do many of the paragraphs. In the middle of a discussion on eunuchs, say, Van Driel invariably stops to tell us something fascinating that he's just remembered – a Greek legend about castration, perhaps – and then never returns to his original point.
But then what was the point? If there is no argument or story, why is all this information here? "Because it relates to testicles" is not a reason and yet "because it relates to testicles", I suspect, is the only reason that Van Driel ever needs. Instead of carrying us with him – as a cultural history, a medical primer or an extended anecdote might – his study simply reads like three books shuffled. Which is why it is actually such a marvellous read. Though Van Driel surely did not write the book as a shambolic introduction to his own obsession, read this way, it is a joy. I defy anyone, for instance, on encountering a section titled "The smell of the scrotum", "Legal action against men without balls", "Misunderstandings about the glans" not to read on.
And what fun there is when we do. For all the laughs that our guide courts deliberately, it is the many more that happen accidentally that make him such good company. Such as when he remarks, with every appearance of surprise, that "relatively little attention has been paid to the glans in poetry". Or later, on "the smell and taste of sperm": "According to reliable sources, it is not unusual for young women today in a get-together in the pub to admit whether they 'swallow' or not. They're not talking about E, amphetamines or suchlike," he adds, with choice redundancy, "but whether or not they swallow sperm."
I do sometimes doubt the veracity of Van Driel's facts or, at least, his assiduity in checking them. And yes, the book contains some lulls – the chapter on vasectomies and infertility, for one, felt very long indeed. But provided you have the sense to take some breaks and skips bits, Manhood is an eccentric delight. And more than that: a monument, though rickety, to science and its driving force, obsession.
