There are very few journalists who can write a good book, and AA Gill is not one of them.
It starts well, with the account of the alcoholism of his 20s. Memoirs of addiction are difficult, being all basically the same story, but he gives his an interesting spin. Here he is on his recovery through William Glasser therapy methods:
Bill Glasser . . . believed that there were five things that people needed in order to function properly, and the first and the greatest of these was love. It wasn’t an original thought. But they don’t tell us this, because frankly no one wants to be told that the answer to everything is love. No one wants the payoff of his tragedy to be the chorus of a pop song.
And there are some nice turns of phrase – here is on his father: “My dad died of Alzheimer’s. I watched him retreat like Napoleon as the frozen winter of the illness buried his memories. He retreated further and further, fighting dogged but ultimately unmemorable rear-guard actions over the remembrances of his life . . . “
But once he is recovered, and himself again, I find I don’t really like that self very much. For a start, he seems to be a kind of pretentious guy. Try this little piece of showing off: “Cookery books are the unconsidered diaries of family life, the everyday history of breakfast, the Veda of lunch, the Decalogue of dinner.” And there’s a lot of this kind of thing: ” . . . the cruet set brought back from honeymoon that sat on a dresser for a lifetime, too silly to use, to fond to throw away, still with the grains of salt that had rested there, the symbol of a friendship and hospitality for a lifetime.”
Worse than this, is its extraordinary insularity. There is a tiny section of North London – a hard core of few hundred people who regard themselves as a sort of intelligentsia – who, like Welsh miners, have heroically resisted globalisation, and a view of their own un-importance in the big world. Antonia Fraser’s MUST YOU GO – read in the dark days before this blog was begun – is the summit of this world view, but this one is pretty bad too. There’s also some extraordinarily awkward name-dropping Try this: “Snowdon: old people and fancy bantams. You could never accuse him of snobbery: he treated them both exactly the same. I’m very fond of Tony, but he could be a bugger just for the devilment of it.” It’s that ‘Tony’ that really grates. And don’t even get me started on his mention of snobbery: Gill has a lot to say on this, but I think you have to have been born in England to know what he’s on about – it drips with unacknowledged class anxiety, which, if you weren’t brought up to it, is one part hard to understand and two parts annoying.
I feel bad to pan this book, as I understand AA Gill has recently passed away. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead; but I suppose it’s all right to speak ill of the dead’s book.