30 Nov 2012 17:33:43
The outstanding achievement in literary biography this year was Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor (Murray £25). Like Dickens (whose life as told by Claire Tomalin was a highlight of 2011), Paddy Leigh Fermor lived life to the limit. Before he was 30, he had not only walked from London to Constantinople, but had fallen in love with a Romanian princess and, famously, abducted a German general in the battle for Crete. Leigh Fermor is a colourful and romantic proposition, but how do you write about a man who has already been mythologised in bestsellers such as Ill Met By Moonlight? Cooper's answer is to find the man behind the myth in a sharp, absorbing portrait of the scholar-gypsy. I was particularly grateful for the news that, until well into old age, Leigh Fermor was able to translate PG Wodehouse ("The Great Sermon Handicap") into classical Greek. For Leigh Fermor, literature was one strand in a colourful braid of experience. For the late David Foster Wallace, it was life (and death) itself. But both loved Wodehouse, apparently. DT Max's painful and painstaking biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (Granta £20), of the cult American writer of the 1990s reports that the author of Infinite Jest had a dog named Jeeves. Eventually, perhaps, there will be a less dazzled portrait of DFW (as he was known). For the moment, Max has made the indispensable first sketch.
Moving on to memoir, the big beast in this year's catalogue is Jack Straw's tale of "a political survivor", Last Man Standing (Macmillan £20). The former foreign secretary and lord chancellor is at pains to tell his readers that his memoirs were not ghosted. "I wrote every word of this book," he says, and it shows. This is an acerbic, plain-spoken, often self-mocking account of Straw's progress up the greasy pole. If there was a price to pay for outlasting almost all his New Labour contemporaries, he does not really address it. Last Man Standing gives a full and entertaining account of the generation whose obsessions morphed from CND to WMD.
Joseph Anton (Jonathan Cape £25), Salman Rushdie's account of his life during and after the fatwa, reads like a thriller. I came to this literary doorstop with the added frisson that I was a witness at several of the events he describes. Say what you like about Rushdie – predictably, the critics have given him an uneven ride – his account of himself is painfully true, despite the contrivance of adopting a third person identity from the names of his two favourite writers, Conrad and Chekhov. By contrast, as an essay in the troublesome question of "I", but much quieter, and more meditative, Winter Journal (Faber £17.99), Paul Auster's second-person narrative addressed to himself, aka "you", takes up the investigation he began with The Invention of Solitude in the 1980s.
Philip Norman's barnstorming Mick Jagger (Harper Collins £20) is a mash-up of "me", "him", "us" and "them". It's an unauthorised life (Sir Mick is too much of a rock god to co-operate with any independent-minded writer), and is probably the better for being untethered. Norman has ploughed this terrain for much of his career, and brings to his subject both a deep fascination with the ecology of rock'n'roll plus a sharp eye for its absurdities.
Where Jagger has prowled the jungle of Hello! and Hollywood like a predator, Rupert Everett has survived, sort of, with an odd combination of sharp teeth, bright eyes, and amazing plumage. Five years ago, he published Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, a deliciously irreverent account of his adventures in La-La land, one of the best recent theatrical memoirs. Now, he's done it again. At the outset, Vanished Years (Little Brown £20) might have a secret ambition to be sadder and wiser, but Everett's eye for hilarious detail turns any elegy into a riot.
I have saved the best for last, Country Girl (Faber £20), the memoir that Edna O'Brien says "I swore I would never write", begun in her 78th year. As a Celt, O'Brien holds a secret communion with the mystery of things. She believes she "saw things before I actually saw them" – ie that her words were always within her. Certainly, hers is one of the most natural and lyrical voices to have come out of Ireland. Her literary DNA is both magical and forensic. No one can nail a scene, or a character, with quite the same perfect brevity. She has lived many lives and known many loves (including Robert Mitchum), but unlike Everett she wants to celebrate and cherish her experience. But this is not a saccharine read. It's a book to crack open on the first day of Christmas, the ideal gift.
