The last time I read any AA Gill, I was a prepubescent leafing through my parent’s copy of The Sunday Times. I remember being impressed by the acerbity. Now, some 20 years later, the sheer acidity of his prose fails to cover his other stylistic woes. George Orwell, who Gill inexplicably claims to have had a “titanic crush” on at school, tells us, “good prose is like a windowpane” in his essay Why I Write. Gill describes, “glazed windows with curtains, behind which is painted a Home Counties landscape” in one of the dive bars he used to drink in. This is an apt description of his prose although he’s also scrawled ‘Look at me! I’m so clever’ across the glass. Arcane words litter the text but fail to add much to the general meaning leaving the impression they’re only there to show you how much he knows. I looked up ‘octorate’, apparently how spider’s move, on google to no avail. He’s also loquacious and floral but in a self-satisfied way that brings little extra satisfaction to the reader. For example, “they hate it and rant at the propinquity, rage against the intimacy” repeats the same idea two, if not three, times and it seems Gill will never use one convoluted, unclear phrase or word where three or four would suffice. The most farcical example of this is the following, written in praise of omission:
“writing is the art of editing, each of these words is the result of a decision not to utilise, call on, pick, substitute, designate, suffer, frog-march, choose other words”
It reads like he’s copied and pasted from a list of synonyms! Other phrases are ludicrously highfalutin; the remnants of a dinner party left to decay are described as, “the corruption of earthly vanity and fleshly lust”. All without apparent irony! There are also some outright mistakes; “ossuaries of bones” is tautological, “actuary accounting” should be “actuarial”. At other points, this 60 year old man writes like a 16 year old referencing “cranking”, “barfing” and saying “they’re on it. They’re doing shit”. It might be faintly amusing and help to appeal to younger readers in a 500 word piece about a restaurant but in a longer, allegedly more reflective, format it’s clunky. It’s populist, shock-jock prose that sits awkwardly with his attempts at a more refined, less colour-supplement journalistic style. Metaphors are mixed and muddled. Tears ‘swim’ down his cheeks, but swimming is something that takes place in water not something water does. There is ‘an attempt to reconstruct, resurrect the boat that is going the other way’ but if it’s going in any direction then presumably it can’t be resurrected as it’s still afloat! He either wants to turn it around or dredge it up from the ocean floor but not both at the same time while chucking in ‘reconstruct’ for good measure. I’m still wondering what phrases like, “they are pre-National Health, a quaint black-and-white starched wimple rectal thermometer condition”, used in reference to DT, or “the wilful extravagance of a tissue-paper basement bohemianism” actually mean other than being a collection of words the author loosely associates with the concept he’s trying to express. The tone is mean and sneering. In the first chapter alone, we contend with references to ‘dagoes’ and ‘randy fat girl[s]’ but at least these are comprehensible. He’s also snobbish, name dropping his quasi-famous society mates and bemoaning that alcoholism and LSD aren’t what they used to be. I find this fecklessness amazing for a former addict and suspect he’s faking it at some level. He tells tall tales about his pathetic exploits as a drunk with a kind of pride makes me wonder if he’s learned anything except to stop drinking. Gill is the consummate attention seeker; seemingly both in prose and life.
Stylistic gripes aside, I found it really hard to work out what’s going on chronologically in the first chapter. There seems to be almost no structure amidst the sneering, the showing off and the confusing metaphors. It’s like he wrote it as a stream of consciousness. We start off and Gill’s in rehab. He’s thirty and he’s talking about some exercise they do in rehab about being adrift at sea and making choices about getting back to land. So far, so comprehensible. However, he then goes on to say that 27 years later he realised he made the wrong choice. As such, I’m thinking he is 57 when he realises this. However, later on he says the book will cover the period between his time and rehab and the end of his marriage, which is between six and eighteen months. Incidentally, this turns out to be totally untrue; the book seems to cover almost all parts of his life apart from this period. It seems he gets divorced first, then stops drinking in rehab a year or so later. So what of the 27 years? We can only presume that he is NOW 27 years removed from the time when he chose to get married and that the choice to get married is the ‘choice’ he is talking about and not the choice he was confronted with in rehab. Perhaps this sort of vagueness is supposed to pique the reader’s interest but I found it unclear and annoying. It’s like he’s remembered the incident from rehab and written about it but then made only the vaguest attempt to connect it to the rest of the chapter. Sadly, unconnected and rambling rants are all too common throughout the book.
We continue in this higgledy-piggledy way through a hodge-podge of half-baked philosophical observations, autobiographical remembrances and miscellania. All suffused with the ambience of a recalcitrant schoolboy dashing off an essay before a deadline. It’s as if Gill believes he’s so clever and his life so interesting that anything he says will be worthwhile. So what’s the point of thinking about what’s being said or giving it a structure? Of course, structure isn’t essential. The real problem is the material, the observations are commonplace but presented in such a smug, self-congratulatory way it’s a nauseating.
The book does improve from the truly shocking start. There are more interesting, and comprehensible, sections on him studying art while at the Slade, a brief history of his family going back two generations and a dissertation on cooking. However, all read like individual essays inserted into the broader stream of consciousness and all suffer from his ‘why use one word when I know fifteen’ approach to writing. None are explicitly linked to the stated subject matter of the book; namely, addiction except for the therapeutic qualities of cooking in his family. Coupled with the insufferable style and propensity to pontificate on subjects well outside his expertise using the same tone of arrogant assertion, it doesn’t amount to good prose. In general, he reminds me a bit of Jeremy Clarkson. He knows about his specialist subject but expresses his knowledge in such a mean spirited way. Both are intelligent and capable of making interesting points but insist on playing the class clown. It’s lowest common denominator stuff; sexism, wild exaggeration, oversimplification of complex issues, racism, xenophobia, outlandish stories, arrogance, name dropping and unsubstantiated opinions presented as facts. Both should really be above such carry-on but are egged on by the class. As the comedian Stuart Lee puts it so unforgettably, “with his outrageous politically incorrect opinions which he has every week to a deadline in The Sunday Times for money”. Anyone wondering why it is so unacceptable for intelligent, privileged people with a public platform to behave like this should watch this part of his stand up routine! I haven’t read any Clarkson since I was about 12 either so perhaps he’s changed, but I very much doubt it. I was most amused when Gill reveals the two are friends, a fine match in my opinion.
Gill also seems fixated on portraying himself as close to penniless throughout the book but doesn’t seem to think it contradictory to mention his expensive education, flats on High Street Kensington, not working and drinking non-stop which all clearly contradict this narrative. I’m not saying they were filthy rich but the idea of him, his father and his brother ‘pooling 30 francs’ to bet on a horse at Longchamp because they had ‘run out of money’ is plainly a ridiculous fabrication. His father was a very successful television producer and director and many parts of the book point to the family’s occupation of fairly elevated social strata. However, as with the outrageous politically incorrect views, Gill must show off and exaggerate at all costs! He also tries to simultaneously claim he is middle class while also working at Tatler, which even he admits is solely for good looking people with trust funds. While his family could be described as upper middle class, it’s clear from the contents of this book, and his job at Tatler, that he is a SERIOUS social climber. His good looks and natural affinity for being a snob probably helped considerably in this regard.
For a brief moment, around Chapter 10, Gill does actually talk about addiction before moving on to more worthy topics like how wonderful he is at journalism, how funny he is and how really it critics who are the lifeblood of the world and facilitate all progress in it. What he says is, for me, far too broad and inauthentic. It’s a sort of caricature of addiction for those who know nothing about it but are interested in it in a sort voyeuristic way. Addicts are this, addicts aren’t this, addicts do this, but addicts don’t do that. It’s as if every single addict were exactly the same and he has knowledge of the whole field because he was once a degenerate with a couple of war stories; most of which sound heavily embellished. He asserts that no addict indulges in self-pity, which is far too general to be meaningful. Of course people feel sorry for themselves, often with good reason, and an addict is no different. He might not feel pity for himself over his addiction, which often has physical and psychological aspects that are hard to overcome, but to assert that it plays no role is simply too broad a statement. In the same vein, we are told “living sober is nothing like as heroically gritty as trying to live stoned and drunk”. Again, that depends on the person, the circumstances and a thousand other variables that Gill doesn’t care to examine. He even goes so far as to say he doesn’t mind if his children take heroin because, “I know what to do about heroin”. It’s hard to express the arrogance and stupidity of this sentence. However, it’s all of a piece; what he wants to do is write something that will shock the non-addict, something at odds with their middle class, Sunday Times view of the world. By turns this can be talking about shitting yourself or claiming heroism for the addict or saying taking heroin is OK. It doesn’t matter, as long as sufficient shock is produced and he’s the centre of attention. It’s tiresome, much like the prose. The exact same motivation lies behind all Gill’s outpourings; he’s showing off and acting for the crowd.
This book doesn’t examine addiction in any detailed or meaningful way. I also suspect it doesn’t really reveal much about Gill’s life. It reads like 100 frivolous pieces for some weekend supplement of the Sunday Times vaguely joined together. He flits from subject to subject telling tall tales and making jokes. The only unifying theme is the desire to shock, to impress, to seem clever or controversial. He thinks he’s hilarious, and even writes as much, but I didn’t even smile once during this book. A consummate show off, he’s always making outlandish claims and trying to show that what others find complicated is comprehensible to him by virtue of his wit and irreverence. He glamorises his addiction and rarely writes about the terrible effects it must have had on those around him. He comes off as a mean, snobbish, arrogant and unpleasant man with a huge ego and far too high an opinion of himself, his views and his exploits, which he admits he largely can’t remember and has probably largely invented. Those hoping for a honest examination of addiction should look elsewhere as this is just a few stories about addiction coupled with a load of sundry material on how great he thinks he is. I had most empathy with the Scandinavian guide who told him, “You’re a cunt”! Just like the glazed pane with the fake Home Counties scenery behind it; Gill shows us a mish mash of fabricated stories through the grubby window of his pretentious prose.
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