YOU won't have heard of the Hemingway Complex but, according to Robert Twigger, if you're a male in the Western world you're probably suffering from it.
It's the nagging feeling that your life is too soft, not manly enough and offers no real tests.
Ernest Hemingway had it in spades.
His third wife, Martha Gellhorn, reckoned he spent most of his time chained to his typewriter. Not the persona 'Papa' wanted to project. For him, writing was no job for a real man - and he promoted a macho image by indulging in tough-guy sports such as boxing, bullfighting and deep-sea fishing.
When things got really bad he took himself off to Africa and shot a few lions.
Twigger contends that most work these days has become too soft. Blacksmiths became motor mechanics, who in turn became the guys who replace the microchip that controls the fuel supply to your car.
Not only that but post-feminism (a word Twigger studiously avoids) we live in a unisex society, one that emphasises the similarities - rather than the differences - between the sexes.
Men are expected to be caring and sharing, and to carry their infant progeny around strapped to their chests in Baby Bjorn slings.
The idea horrifies Twigger as he drags himself into Mothercare to get 'Bjorned-up'on the day his wife is due to go into hospital for the induced birth of their first baby - a day that provides the trigger and loose framework for these philosophical musings on masculinity in the modern world.
Random though these thoughts seem, collectively they form a cogent view.
Without manly work, with women doing men's jobs
and men becoming househusbands and childminders, we have to try that much harder to be 'male' or 'female', and turn in desperation to outward displays of gender.
Women have breast implants.
Men shave their heads and get themselves tattooed. There's more violence because beating someone up is one of the few ways left to prove you're a man.
And prove it we must, it seems. We're simply not genetically programmed to be happy as 'new men'. Twigger points out that men have ten times more testosterone than women, and it needs to do what it was put there for: to face danger, to endure pain, to fight.
Tony Parsons has described Twigger - whose previous books include his account of learning Aikido with the Tokyo riot police, and the story of his attempt to catch the world's longest snake in the jungles of the Far East - as 'a 19th-century adventurer trapped in the body of a 21st-century writer'.
Certainly, his life as it unfolds here in flashbacks is one of seeking out danger and difficulty, and exposing himself to unnecessary hardship and risk.
Looking back on these heroics, Twigger ponders the cause of his urge to keep risking life and limb, and his conclusion finally pins down for him what modern man lacks: the Rite Of Passage - the special testing that males in most primitive societies pass through. The opportunity to prove, once and for all, that you're a man.
always it involves at least the possibility of death, or great endurance, or killing (usually some dangerous beast), or mastering some skill (usually making something to kill some dangerous beast with).
The civilised male has no such rite. We no longer see life as a journey in which one is transformed by experience. For us, happiness comes from having more: more things, more relationships, more freedom.
Twigger's likeable, honest and humorously self-deprecating personality shines through his shambolic structure to produce an entertaining, thoughtprovoking book about the cost to men of civilisation.
But, ultimately, it poses more questions than it provides answers. Can you turn back the clock on social change?
And, if so, does primitive necessarily mean better?
What about disease, deprivation and the repression of women in the non-Western world? Or can you just cherrypick the bits of other cultures that appeal to you?
Not to mention the big question: which Hemingway means more to us - the one who wrote books or the one who killed lions?
