A worthy addition to the series
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I'll admit I was a little disappointed when I first read North Face of Soho, but after reading it a second time I now feel it makes a perfect addition to the series. Getting over the disappoint was just a matter of taking the book on its own terms. At times it does feel like a different book from its predecessors, but there are good reasons for this (James himself discusses them at the end of the third volume) and the differences don't detract from the usual levels of style, story-telling and entertainment we've come to expect.
The main differences relate to the book's focus, which James feels has to be narrower than before. He operates a strict media blackout when it comes to his family so we sadly get almost nothing of Clive James the husband or father. But James more than compensates by giving us a superbly engaging account of his professional development: his first successes in literary journalism and television, the failures that inevitably accompanied them, the people who influenced him, and the slow but steady rise to stability and stardom. We might be sorry that he rarely strays beyond these limits, but, as usual, we can't fault him on the story that he does tell.
Aside from different content there is also a change in overall tone, with the author's sense of the clock running down informing much of his commentary. His impressions as he occupies `the waiting room' can tend towards the fatalistic at times, but the old sparkle is never far away; the funny moments may be slightly fewer and further between, but they are certainly there and when they arrive they are as painfully funny as you would expect. (And if the author sounds a little more serious, we can hardly begrudge this in a book about growing up.)
James is an older man now and it's no surprise if he isn't writing exactly the same kind of book he was writing ten or twenty years ago. But the current volume of memoirs displays an impressive continuity with its predecessors and there's every reason to look forward to the next. Read this one in the context of the other three, accept that it will have a slightly different feel to it, and you won't be disappointed.
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The Best Yet
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"Falling Towards England" was always the funniest book I've ever read. In this latest installment of his memoirs Clive James takes the humour of the previous volume and hones it to a sophisticated perfection - the descriptions of his colleagues and various editors and mentors at The Pillar of Hercules had me bellowing with laughter - but tempers it with an older wisdom, a poignant sense of time passing all too quickly and not in the right direction.
Here too are some wonderful apercus about the process of writing, and a passionate sense of how much it matters. The result is a celebration of the fun of bohemia and of the deep seriousness which must underpin it if the work is to get done.
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A change of pace
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It's been a long time since the last installment of Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs appeared in 1990; the previous one came out five years before then, and the original volume (from which the series takes its title) five years before that. So there's been a change of pace, and there's a change of style as well. Much of the appeal of the first three books came from the stories of how a well-respected, intelligent, prolific media figure started out in life; the contrast between his tough public persona and - say - the defecating, masturbating, over-consuming child depicted in the first volume was particularly striking. The air of self-deprecation (if not brutal honesty) hung over the second and third installments, as he sought to make his way to England, and established himself at Cambridge.
Although this installment follows on immediately from the end of the last one (where he was just about to leave Cambridge following his marriage), everything changes here. Being more an account of how he found his way into London's media scene (where he became preeminent), he's left out the self-deprecation, preferring to tell the story straight. Part of this appears to be a sharing of his experiences in an attempt to instruct any reader who has ideas about following in his footsteps. This is doubtless a worthy cause, but it has the effect of limiting the range of appeal for the book - certainly when compared to the original volume, which (as he acknowledges here) has become the most popular of all his books.
So lovers of his wit and humour won't find much to admire here. They also won't find many examples of his brilliantly coruscating style - indeed, parts of the writing appear to be somewhat rushed, as he makes promises to return to subjects in a way that's almost chatty, and certainly not up to his usual standards of construction. The hubris that he's sometimes accused of breaks through here and there as well, as when he attempts to excuse his poor listening skills by noting that "they used to accuse Scott Fitzgerald of the same thing". However, there are still memorable examples of his characteristic knack for finding exactly the right image, as on p150: "If all the accomplished but not especially interesting would-be writers became schoolteachers and taught grammar, the country would be on the road to recovery. The sky has more stars than it knows what to do with, but it can't do without gravity."
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Disappointing after the excellent Unreliable Memoirs.
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Clive James has a lot to answer for, I obsessively read and reread the first three volumes of his autobiography. The combination of bad behaviour and good delivery was irresistible.
Unfortunately this volume was much flatter, it deals with James' formative media years as a writer for the Observer and a rising TV presenter.
Becoming a household name is obviously a lot of hard work, and it generally seems that Clive has less affection for these times, unfortunately it shows in the writing. Although there are laugh out loud parts of the book, they are rarer than the first three books, and generally a feeling of exhaustion and self reference seems to have overcome the whole project. When he starts quoting himself in the final chapters, it begins to get quite irritating.
The chapter on interviewing movie stars is very funny and astute but the rest is quite ordinary. He's also quite dismissive of Manchester and far too nice to media types like Janet Street Porter and Pamela Stephenson.
Don't bother unless you're a fan.
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Among the soho boozers
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There is much to admire in Clive James's writing: erudition, compact phrasing and a discursive style that can engage a reader's interest in often obscure topics. Unfortunately, the fourth instalment of memoirs takes all these elements and regurgitates them into accidental self-parody.
The problem that the author has is that the launching of his undeniably successful media career is likely to be of far less interest to his readers than it so obviously is to himself. The first three books derived their humour from the pitfalls of growing up in the suburbs and overcoming the gaucheness and pretensions of early adulthood, topics we can all relate to in some way.
The current book deals at inordinate length with the details of freelance contracts, negotiating a salary increase at the Observer and the rather inane accoutrements of the jobbing journalist - which doubtless induces a shiver of recognition in struggling freelancers but remains superfluous in terms of riveting biography. It is hard to see how we are supposed to interpret these vignettes apart from the fact that they are entirely self-congratulatory.
The same goes for the long passages about having lunch with Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. Despite the fact that Christopher Hitchens has had an awful lot of lunches with many people of interest, the buyers of this book are unlikely to be among them. The most revealingly comment on the "London Literary Society" lunch club, as Mr James dubs them, is that few, if any of them, have produced anything of note in years and Christopher Hitchens has become the cell block punk for the neo-conservatives in Washington.
There is enough in the book to sustain the read, but be prepared for the type of belaboured puns, metaphors and similies that bear all the hallmarks of a once-good writer in terminal decline. The recent Robert Hughes autobiography, an Australian contemporary and also part of the 1960's Kangeroo valley in London, shows a much better grasp of factual storytelling.
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