A must for those who can't get enough of "Dance"
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I don't usually read memoirs or biographies because I think they are a second-hand (and second-best) approach to literature, and I certainly don't recommend this book to anyone who has not read the author's novels. This time though, having spent so much time reading "Dance" and listening to its audio version by Simon Callow, I thought I owed it to myself to dig a little deeper into this remarkable author. Most of all, I hoped this book would convey some of the atmosphere of "Dance", of which I cannot have enough. I think it did. The people and the places of these memoirs are not to be regarded as "keys" to the book but they certainly were inspirational to "Dance" and AP often mentions the similarities and differences between those people and their fictional counterparts. There is some name-dropping and, of course, the vast majority of the names will remain unknown to me but their doings and idiosyncrasies, described in the usual AP style, are interesting in their own right. It has been said that AP revealed little about himself in his memoirs. This is true but therein lies, maybe, the strength of AP's approach to writing: a good novelist, according to AP, is one more interested in other people than in himself/herself. This is the principle followed in this book.
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