Michael Moorcock: The Whispering Swarm (2015)

Edition: Gollancz, 2015
Review number:1500

Are there any literary devices which have not been attempted in novels, by 2015? The Whispering Swarm certainly attempts one which I have never seen before. Many novels include autobiographical elements, but here Michael Moorcock mingles straight autobiographical material with historical fantasy. The autobiographical elements match my knowledge of Moorcock's life picked up as a fan of many years' standing; the fantasy elements centre round the mysterious Alsacia, a part of central London which acts as a refuge (this part is accurate, there was such an area which for historical reasons had the rules of sanctuary applied to it), and which can take those who find it to a semi-mythical London from the past.

Does the idea work? Basically, I don't think it does. There is clearly a desire on Moorcock's part to contrast the mundane real world and the glimpse beyond that in to fantasy, but this means that The Whispering Swarm feels like it is made up of distinct parts which could be pasted together sections from two different stories. It even feels as is though the prose style used changes, more matter of fact for the real world, more poetical and descriptive for the fantasy.

For most of Part One (the first third or so of the novel), Moorcock-as-character has either not yet discovered Alsatia, or is trying to ignore what he thinks might be a delusion. So the fantasy plays little part, and this left me as a reader wanting to skip forward to something more interesting. However, even when Alsatia plays a greater part, it too turns out to be fairly dull, and it is hard for the reader to invest in any of the characters, in either milieu.

The title refers to the noise Moorcock and a few others can sense, the combined voices of the inhabitants of this fantasy London. This is in itself an interesting concept, and would relate well to the themes of his best literary novel, Mother London. That is also about the mythic significance of London, and is much more successful, partly because it is a fully synthesised novel. The best urban fantasy evocations of London (such as those written by Neil Gaiman, Ben Aaronovitch, or Kate Griffin, among others) are also better at integrating the fantasy elements with a real world setting, and also possess a sense of humour which seems to have disappeared from Moorcock's recent work.

I have long been a fan of Michael Moorcock, since my early teens, but have found much of what he has written in the last decade unpalatable for one reason or another. Despite an interesting and unusual idea, The Whispering Storm also fails to impress me. My rating - 5/10.

George MacDonald Fraser: The Light's On at Signpost (2002)

Best known to me as the author of the fantastic Flashman novels, George MacDonald Fraser turns out from this volume of memoirs to have also been involved in the scriptwriting for a number of well known films of the 1970s, and to have had a lot of strongly held opinions,  both of which he was able to write about in an interesting if sometimes irritating manner.

The wildly diverse material in this book is helpfully divided into appropriately titled alternating sections, either Shooting Script or Angry Old Man, with Interludes - comment difficult to fit into either category - interspersed every so often. This means that the reader with little tolerance for political ranting but an interest in the cinema can read self-admittedly star struck reminiscences of films from The Three Musketeers to Superman and Octopussy; and the Daily Mail-reading UK Independence Party supporter can confirm their prejudices without bothering with the cultural memories. (Even if you agree with everything he says, however, I think that the tone of the latter sections would become wearing after a while.) Reading them both, though, has a jarring effect due to the contrast in tone between vitriolic rage at the state of Britain at the start of the twenty-first century, and affectionate enjoyment of the opportunities to work with a long list of stars. The Light's On at Signpost presents a schizophrenic reading experience, and is hard to enjoy.

Fraser lived at this time on the Isle of Man, and the book's title is a Manx expression. Derived from the practice of turning on a light at the top of a signpost when a rider in the TT motorcycle road race is nearing the end of the final lap, it is used to indicate how near death Fraser felt (though  in the end he lived for another six years, producing two more novels and another volume of non-fiction). The book basically contains the things that he wanted to say before he would no longer be able to, and it has for this reason something of the feel of a series of blog posts. At the end, Fraser describes the book as a "mixed bag", and that is a pretty exact description of what it is. It was interesting to read once, but I certainly won't be picking it up again now that I have.

I'd rate the film sections at 7/10, and the angry old man sections at 3/10, which averages to a rating of 5/10 for The Light's On at Signpost as a whole.


Edition: HarperCollins, 2003 (Available to purchase from Amazon here)
Review number: 1453

P.R. Reid: The Colditz Story (1952)

Edition:  Coronet, 1972

The Colditz Story is the tale of the British prisoners of war incarcerated in Oflag IV C, Colditz Castle, which was used to hold officers who had already attempted to escape from other camps by the Germans during the Second World War. Reid, as Escape Officer (co-ordinator of escape attempts) helped organise many escapes and was in an ideal position to document them. The book covers the period from Reid's arrival as Colditz was being set up, to his own successful escape to Switzerland a couple of years later.

The story of the ingenious escape attempts from Colditz are almost as famous as that of the Great Escape, and the book was immensely successful, not just becoming a TV series (which this edition was released to tie in with) but a board game which I remember playing in the seventies. The book used to be in just about every library (including school libraries) in the UK. (I don't know if it is this popular today, but it is noticeable that the public libraries I use still have a Second World War section which is much larger than the rest of history put together, so similar tales continue to hold the imagination of the British public.) This means that it will have been read by any voracious male (it almost certainly appeals more to boys) reader of my age or older, and many more will have seen the TV show (I was a few years too young to see it myself.) The story told by Reid is very memorable, and I found myself remembering details I hadn't read for thirty years.

Reid immortalises a particular kind of heroics, which is also one stereotypically associated with the products of the British public school system. It is all about the battle of wits with the Germans, and the game effectively become more important than the ends. Clausewitz is frequently quoted as saying that "War is the continuation of politics by other means." (It is in fact a slight misquotation.) But to Pat Reid and others like him, usually enthusiastic products of an English public school, it would be more correct to suggest that was was the continuation of the sports field by other means. However, the value of an escape (to anyone other than the escapee) was in the end not in the chess game which led to it.

So, is is really the duty of every prisoner of war to attempt to escape? Reid takes it for granted that this is the case, so much so that he doesn't even discuss the officers' reasons for making achingly difficult escape attempts (such as carrying out such a convincing simulation of insanity that the escapee risked suffering mental damage as a result). According to Wikipedia's list, there were 37 successful escapees from Colditz, 10 of them British. This is a vanishingly small number among the war's combatants, and it is not likely that any of them would have been so effective individually that their escape would have made a direct military difference to the outcome of the war. (This argument doesn't hold so well for other nationalities, such as the French and Belgians, whose home countries were occupied.)

The only conceivable benefit to the war effort from a successful escape that I can see would be through morale boosting propaganda. I'm not saying that this would be a negligible benefit, but another thing which Reid doesn't mention is what the escapees did on returning home. First British escapee, Airey Neave, went on to work for MI9, the British secret service in charge of aiding resistance movements in occupied Europe, but he was by a long way the most distinguished of the escapees (and probably the best known British inmate with the exception of Douglas Bader). Reid himself was unable to return to Britain until after the war. Others were killed in action, or their escape remained the major event of their war service. Nothing I can see in Wikipedia entries (not necessarily the most authoritative source, but easily accessible) suggests that the British used escapees for propaganda purposes. Compared to the work of SOE, the activities of Schindler, or the dedication of the Bletchley code breakers, POW escapes were extremely unimportant in the history of the War. If it does  not serve the overall aim of winning the war in any particular way, it is surely not a duty bound on every prisoner of war.

Compared to many prisoners of war, those incarcerated in Colditz were not particularly ill treated. Food was sparse, but that was something fairly commonplace in wartime Germany - and it should be remembered that the Nazi regime was not a signatory to the international convention which governed the treatment of prisoners of war (and yet the regime at Colditz seems to have respected the convention's rules - they had exercise, access to primitive medical care, and even received parcels from home). The imprisoned officers were not forced to work themselves to death, or used for medical experimentation, or killed in large numbers, as Jewish prisoners were. They were certainly very well treated compared those British soldiers captured by the Japanese. And in more modern times; the Americans who suffered sleep deprivation in the Gulf, or the terrorist suspects waterboarded by the CIA were worse off. So bad treatment was also not a big motive for escape.

Another question which occurred to me that passed me by thirty years ago was whether escapes like those detailed here would be possible now. Reid says at several points that he is suppressing details, so that the same tricks could be reused without the authorities in the camp being aware of them in advance - he obviously expects the inmates to be more clever than the guards in terms of reading between the lines. But a lot has changed in almost sixty years. There was no electronic surveillance; in fact, the use of microphones hidden around Colditz to detect tunnelling was probably the first move in this direction. So there were no cameras, no use of biometrics (it was even possible to use handmade plaster statues to hide the absence of inmates at roll calls), no electronic keys on doors, no automatic closing of doors when alarms were sounded, and so on. However, we have all of these in prisons today, and yet there are still escaped criminals, so perhaps it would still be possible to get out of a POW camp.

Reid is a product of his class and time. There are so many details in his writing which indicate this; one which is symptomatic is the way that, whenever he introduces a new character, he lists the school (invariably a public school, which says something about how the British armed forces chose officers sixty years ago) attended by the prisoner. Where the school is not one of the best known (Eton, Harrow, Rugby, etc), this is not going to tell the reader much unless they also went to a public school.

Reid's style is unpolished, not that of a journalist or novelist. He consistently uses unvarying derogatory slang: the Germans are always Gerries, the guards are always goons, and so on. He is an extremely keen user of exclamation marks, something which I find particularly irritating when reading. But on the whole the interest of the stories overcomes all the difficulties and makes The Colditz Story a good read. My rating: 6/10.

Chris Verrill: Is For Good Men to Do Nothing (2004)

Edition: XLibris, 2004
Review number: 1286

What was your initial reaction to the September 11th atrocity? Watching it in California at a communal breakfast with other Americans (as Chris Verrill did) is likely to have had a very different feel from the experience I had of seeing it happen in mid-afternoon. To many, it was shock and grief (with perhaps a tinge of guilty thrill at the drama of the collapsing towers - I remember some comments at the time that the news coverage had something of the air of a Hollywood film stunt) or a desire for revenge; in other circles, it was glee at the humbling of American power. For me, too, my reaction was somewhat conditioned by previous near involvement with a terrorist attack: I was within earshot of an IRA bomb in the City of London, and it damaged the church I was attending at the time. As an aside, something that has irritated me since 9/11 is the way that Americans seem to suggest it was the only terrorist attack that ever happened. For Chris Verrill, the first reaction of shock was quickly followed by a burning desire to do something constructive; Is For Good Men to Do Nothing is the story of what he did.

There were two sides to what he did: first, he travelled the world to try to understand how people who were not Americans thought about the attack and the wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq; at the same time, he worked to get a Rotary Club sponsored educational project under way in Afghanistan. There is a shared motive for both: the idea that ignorance is one of the main issues which led to the attack and which helped define the American response and the way in which the rest of the world percieved it. Verrill readily admits that education on both sides is necessary; there are still many Americans who have never been outside the forty eight continental states and who live in appalling ignorance of the rest of the world.

Now, Chris Verrill is also happy to acknowledge that Americans have made mistakes, most notably in their flauting of international law (in company with the UK) in the attack on Iraq which was unsanctioned by the United Nations. My feeling is that he perhaps doesn't go far enough in this, though he meets many people who are willing to tell him so far more forcefully than I would. This feeling is partly one that I have in response to George W. Bush, who comes across as the epitome of the stereotypical American: arrogant, dumb, ignorant, loud, and under the thumb of the interests of cynical businessmen. A recurrent theme of the discussions in the book is argument over just how much sincerity there has been in the stated US war aims in Iraq, as opposed to how much the conflict is over control of oil reserves.

A lot of reviews of this book are likely, I suspect, to do what I have started doing: put together a review which is really an essay entitled "What I think about 9/11 and the war in Iraq". While such thoughts may be of interest (and it is important to set out how the reviewer's perspective differs from the authors, if readers are going to be able to evaluate the review), the purpose of a review is not to make a political speech but to help a potential reader decide whether they will like a book. I suspect that there are many people who will be put off by the subject and would not even consider picking up Is For Good Men to Do Nothing, either because they just aren't interested in politics or because they feel that there is nothing more worth reading about 9/11. In fact, this is a really interesting story, mainly because Verrill comes across as genuinely interested in the opinions he hears, even when they are very different from his own. More than that, this book gives hope that there are Americans not caught up in mindless jingoism and above all shows that determination to make a difference is important.

In one way, this is a book which has changed my opinions. Not about Bush or Bin Laden, but about the Rotarians. The Rotary Club is not an organisation I knew much about, but the impression I had was that it was sort of like the Freemasons, but for those who couldn't be bothered about stupid rituals. I thought it was a mutual aid organisation for members of the establishment, the kind of place where the behind the scenes machinations of minor right wing politicians might occur. But now I know more, and it turns out that it is a worldwide charitable organisation full of people who want to make a difference.

There is one thing I feel I need to mention, even though it is rather pedantic. The quotation that supplies the title (in case anyone doesn't know, the rest of it basically says that this is the way for evil to triumph) is popularly attributed to eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke (perhaps best known for his protests against the restrictions placed on the American colonies which led to independence), and Verrill follows this. However, if you look it up in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, this is listed under "Misquotations", and turns out to be a popular version of a less memorable statement made by Burke.

This may be just a little piece of pedantry, but there's something else I didn't like much, which comes near the end. It is not that a speech made by George W. Bush is praised; given the quotations, I too thought it admirable. But then Verrill uses the speech as the basis of a patriotic appeal: not only does it make him proud to be an American (fair enough), but it should make the reader proud to be an American. This jarred - because I'm not an American; and it felt as though Chris Verrill was committing the very kind of unthinking chauvinism that he is writing the book to combat. I was unfortunately left feeling uncomfortable for the final twenty or so pages.

Despite this, I enjoyed Is For Good Men to Do Nothing, which is an excellent piece of journalistic writing. It makes the reader think, and in the current climate that can never be a bad thing.

Janna Levin: How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space (2002)

Edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002
Review number: 1123

It is not, generally speaking, usual for modern science books to be concerned with the private lives of their authors, even though it is inevitable that the scientific work that they have done will have been influenced by this. This is a result of the idea that scientific ideas should be valid without any cultural context, but the anecdotes which litter popular science books demonstrate how important some subjectivity is for interesting the reader - few people read textbooks for pleasure. An excellent example is Pais' 'Subtle is the Lord...', which is a biography of Einstein which places equal emphasis on his life story and an explanation of his ideas.

How the Universe Got Its Spots is based on a series of letters written by cosmologist Janna Levin to her mother, which seek to explain her work. I don't know how much Levin's mother already knew, but the letters don't presuppose significant amounts of scientific and mathematical education; which makes even writing the letters in the first place quite a brave thing to do; a parent is a far more difficult audience than some unknown reader. The letters also contain details of her personal life over a two year period, a diary of the gradual breakdown of Levin's relationship with musician Warren.

Levin's work is in the topology of cosmology, trying to come up with possible descriptions of the large scale shape and structure of the universe. This may be discernible as patterns in such measurements as the COBE map of variations in the cosmic background radiation. The ideas which are introduced to explain this include a fair amount of topology, which is one of the more entertaining branches of mathematics. The explanations of the ideas behind Levin's work are clear and simple (though as someone who has studied topology I might well not be a good judge).

It is for the combination of the science and the personal history that readers will pick up How the Universe Got Its Spots, however. The way that the two are put together makes the book reminiscent of a novel which was a bestseller a few years ago, Sophie's World by Jostein Gaardner. That book, though intended to introduce children to philosophy, was enjoyed by large numbers of adults; and if you liked it, you are pretty certain to like this.

Bryan Magee: Confessions of a Philosopher (1997)

Edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997
Review number: 1035

Brian Magee has spent much of his adult life presenting "highbrow" TV programmes, mainly attempting to popularise philosophy. This book is partly autobiography, and partly short accounts of the ideas of some of the philosophers who have been important in his life.

Having been disturbed by philosophical problems (such as whether the world we see is real) to an unusual extent as a child, Magee studied philosophy. However, he was disillusioned by postgraduate study at Oxford, then in the grip of linguistic analysis, which he felt was both sterile and, because not concerned with what he considered the real problems, not really philosophy. Eventually moving into TV, he used the fact that it paid well to work only half the time, spending the rest of his life studying philosophy, attending concerts and seeing plays. In the course of time, he came to know two of the outstanding philosophers of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper.

The major portion of the book consists of explanations of the main philosophical problems as Magee sees them (those raised by Kant, basically), and descriptions of the ideas of several philosophers, both those who have attacked these problems (particularly Schopenhauer, for whom he has a great admiration) and those who turned important schools of twentieth century philosophy away from them into the dead ends of logical positivism and linguistic analysis. These explanations, generally well integrated with the biographical material, are clear and easy to read, and have the real virtue of pointing the reader to the original sources (while warning of some of the most difficult to read - Hegel, Fichte in particular).

Confessions of a Philosopher has certainly made me want to go away and read more philosophy and think about these problems; and that is something that I think would make Magee feel he has succeeded.

Hammond Innes: Sea and Islands (1967)

Edition: William Collins, 1967
Review number: 607

Thriller writer Hammond Innes was also a sailor and traveller; Sea and Islands is a collection of travelogues recording voyages in his yacht Mary Deare (named after the boat wrecked in one of his best known novels) and several other journeys.

The voyages, forming the first part of the book, are around the North Sea and Mediterranean; the journeys in the second part venture further afield. The trips themselves are not terribly interesting, ranking as standard pieces of journalism that most professional writers could probably put together fairly quickly. Probably at the time the whole book could be dismissed in that way, though today there is some value in the depictions of a Mediterranean that has largely vanished under the onslaught of package tourism. The trip to Tito's Yugoslavia is particularly fascinating, as that was a society that now feels even more remote.

However, there are more evocative books dealing with this part of Innes' subject, notably those by Gerald Durrell about pre-war Corfu and his brother Lawrence's about Cyprus in the days leading up to the island's independence. These books are about a time a little earlier than the mid-sixties coverages of Sea and Islands, but both writers were more closely involved with what they were writing about and both were better writers (and, moreover, wrote amusingly).

To any student of Innes' writing, if there are such, Sea and Islands would be vitally important: many of the settings for his novels are based on what he saw on journeys included in this book. But for others, the time has passed when they will be of any great interest.

Alec Guinness: Blessings in Disguise (1985)

Edition: Fontana, 1986
Review number: 598

All too often actors' anecdotes amount to "You should have seen me in (whatever). I was wonderful." Alec Guinness, however, carries the opposite approach to such an extreme in his memoirs that you wonder how he ever became a success. His humility sometimes comes over as a little affected, but does at least leave room for him to write positively about many of his colleagues, legends of the twentieth century theatre and film.

Rather than opting for a straightforwardly chronological approach, Blessings in Disguise is organised in a thematic manner. Most of the "themes" are accounts of his relationships with particular people, such as Ralph Richardson, though one of the longest sections is about the way in which his religious convictions evolved until he was received into the Catholic church.

My major criticism of Blessings in Disguise as a memoir of Alec Guinness is that it concentrates on his stage acting to the almost total exclusion of his film roles. Given that vastly more people have seen just one of the films in which he appeared (Star Wars) than will ever have seen him on stage, and given the esteem in which his film acting is held, this is to be regretted. To take the example just cited, Star Wars is mentioned only once in the book, in the context of an imaginary interview in which Alec Guinness says that it effectively means he could be reasonably comfortable for the rest of his life. Interesting issues such as what he thought of George Lucas - and even more with reference to other films, what he thought of David Lean, with whom he famously fell out - are ignored.

On the whole, I enjoyed the anecdotes (though the early sections are a bit difficult to get through), but would have preferred a more balanced account of the life and personality of one of the twentieth century's greatest actors.

Leo Tolstoy: A Confession (1865)

Edition: Everyman
Review number: 536

In contrast to Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, with which it is packaged in this Everyman edition, A Confession is a work of non-fictional autobiography. It followed Tolstoy's greatest work, rather than preceding it as Notes From Underground did that of the older writer. There are similarities, in that both authors use these short pieces of writing to set out something of their views on life, and as these philosophical ideas are vitally part of their great novels, the works bear similar roles in the authors' output as a whole.

The subject of A Confession - not a title Tolstoy liked, but imposed by publishers because of similarities to Rousseau's Confessions - is the move of the writer away from the religious certainties of his Orthodox childhood. This started with an excited discussion between Lev and his brothers after one of them had been told that there was no God. The line of thought taken by Tolstoy from that date parallels that of the writer of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, which is quoted at length. Basically, Ecclesiastes looks at the world from a purely materialistic point of view, and comes to the conclusion that it is meaningless; only God, the writer feels, can make sense of life. Tolstoy does not take the same final step, being put off by the vast differences between the professed values and the actions of those who called themselves believers in the nineteenth century Russia upper classes. He tried to copy the simple faith of the peasantry, by just glossing over the parts of Orthodox ritual he didn't 'understand' - the word he uses, though he really means 'identify with' in today's terms. When he realised that this amounted to most of the ritual, he left the church and effectively formulated his own personal religion, trying to follow the moral teachings of the New Testament while jettisoning every other part of Christianity.

Tolstoy's religious writings, of which this is the best known and (I think) the first, were fairly influential in the last years of the nineteenth century. He considered these works his most important and retired from novel writing to concentrate on them, before returning to fiction with Resurrection years later - and even then, the novel was written as a way to publicise his ideas.

Today, the religious work of Tolstoy is relatively obscure, and there are both historical and literary reasons for this. The Russian Revolution brought suspicion in the West on ideas from that country, even if they were not Communist in origin. Thus, Tolstoy ceased to be cited as an influence on atheistic humanism, even as this became one of the dominant philosophies of the twentieth century. From a literary point of view, Tolstoy tends to play to the gallery; in A Confession, the autobiography is smoothed out for public consumption, every action rationalised and justified (in a rhetorical way, the philosophical argument being of a poor standard). In the end, the reader is left wondering whether Tolstoy really believes what he says, and certainly is in doubt as to the way he actually reached these beliefs.

Tony Hawks: Round Ireland With A Fridge (1998)

Edition: Ebury, 1998
Review number: 437

Tony Hawks once did a comedy show in Ireland, and saw the bizarre sight of someone hitch-hiking with a fridge as though this were a perfectly normal thing to do. Telling this to a group of friends back in England led to a drunken bet that he could hitch-hike all the way around Ireland in under a month, with a fridge.

The story of the journey is amusing, but the reaction he gets is much what you would expect, bemused but genial helpfulness. There are no real surprises.

Hawks decided to go round the Republic only, omitting Northern Ireland, for reasons which derive from the Troubles. Because of the impression gained from thirty years' worth of TV news coverage, the average English person has the idea that Northern Irish life is only about bombs and punishment beatings. When he had to travel into Armagh, he did end up in one of the more intimidating parts of Northern Ireland, among "Beware of Snipers" signs and sectarian graffiti, and this served to strengthen this opinion. I was actually living in Northern Ireland at the time of Hawks' trip, and my impression was very different. The people are really friendly, in a way which is no longer seen in England, even though the community is so divided; the grim towns (full of houses built in dark stone in depressing styles) contrast with beautiful countryside - the lakes of Fermanagh, the Antrim coast and Giant's Causeway, the Sperrin mountains.

Ngaio Marsh: Black Beech and Honeydew (1965/1981)

Updated version: 1981
Edition: Fontana, 1985
Review number: 427

In the life of Ngaio Marsh, there are three major themes: her New Zealand background, her love of the theatre, and her writing of detective novels. Her autobiography, first published in the sixties and revised a few years before her death, concentrates on the first two to the virtual exclusion of the third. More is said of the journalism which began her writing career than of the Alleyn series. There are many possible reasons why she might do this, but I suspect that it is mainly that writing is not a spectacularly interesting activity to write about. Once a writer has answered the questions "Where do you get your ideas from?" and "Are your characters based on real people?" there isn't much to say. Marsh doesn't really answer the first question, but the answer to the second is definitely yes.The reader is introduced to the Lampreys, close friends of Marsh only marginally less irritating than their fictional versions.

The major interest in the autobiography is the story of Marsh's involvement in the theatre. Her contributions to the development of New Zealand based theatre were important enough for them to be the reason she was awarded the DBE rather than her writing. She was an actress, but was best known for her direction, especially of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was considered too difficult for New Zealand audiences, but British touring companies had some success, and so did Marsh with companies made up principally of students. It always seems that a good production of Shakespeare can be understood and enjoyed by any audience; it is the way that he is taught in schools and the immensity of his reputation that put people off.

In the end, this is not an autobiography which reveals much about its subject; it tells us little that cannot be picked up from the detective stories - the love of theatre and of her country of origin comes across quite strongly in several of them.

John Gielgud: An Actor and His Time (1979)

Edition: Penguin, 1981
Review number: 143

John Gielgud's memoir covers roughly the first sixty years of his life, and is adapted from a series of radio talks. A large part of the book is taken up with Gielgud's impressions of the other actors he met during this period, beginning with those from his grandmother's famous family, the Terrys. (A major part of the adaptation to book form is the addition of comprehensive notes detailing the careers of the actors mentioned; very useful if you don't know a great deal about the famous actors of the early part of the twentieth century.)

Gielgud is unfailingly modest about his own talents and generous about those of others. As a writer, he is better at - and clearly more interested in - recounting amusing anecdotes than in detailed analysis of acting technique. This is particularly the case in dealing with his own career; he is not introspective in the least. This is not a real problem; if you want insight into how an actor carrys out his craft, this is not the book you would choose to read. The anecdotes are delightful and well-told, and it is valuable to have a record of the memories of one who through the length of his career and his family connections provides a link with a long bygone age of the British theatre.