Gripping from the start

Having abandoned Nutshell, Ian McEwan’s latest novel supposedly written by Hamlet in his mother’s womb, I have turned my attention more rewardingly to the third volume of Alan Bennett’s compendious diaries, now out and written more enticingly from London, Yorkshire, and abroad.

Though McEwan compounded  my problem by updating  what happens to Hamlet  - not without wit, it must be  said  - Bennett is plain sailing in comparison, his 800 pages, squeezed into my Kindle with no added weight. The result is  a vast and enthralling landscape of the most  recent portion of his life. It is a subject to which I shall return,  but  not the only one.

For I have also been reading Sir Peter Hall’s candid autobiography, amusingly entitled Making an Exhibition of Myself, written in the wake of his exhaustive National Theatre diaries and beginning his story back at the beginning. In other hands this could have proved hard work but Hall did not go into a theatrical life for nothing.  The son of an impoverished railway station master in East Anglia, he tells the tale of his career vividly, writing of his Cambridgeshire schooldays when, among other things, he learned the piano and served as a church organist, practising - more than a little scared - alone in a darkened church at night before having to lock the premises and creep home.

Though Philip Larkin said he preferred to begin reading autobiographies halfway though, “when the chap has grown up and become more interesting,” Hall is interesting from the start, which is what you would hope. He makes clear how soon, despite all  the obstacles,  he was  drawn into the theatrical life, firstly at school, and then gradually succeeding in adulthood.   It is very much the book I would have wanted from him - alert, perceptive, edgy to the point of paranoia - and it follows his trail to the top with a sense of wonder that it is actually  happening.  How in the end he won  international fame is, as they say, un-put-downable.

Alan Bennett in his latest diaries admits to a Larkin complex about autobiographies and confesses that he reads them backwards. Their opening chapters - like those of many outsize modern biographies as well - can indeed be heart sinking, even when their authors have something to say.  Happily, Sir Peter Hall, though he now suffers in his eighties from from dementia in a London retirement home, was not like that.

Though I may yet return to the new McEwan - while being aware for now that, as several of his previous novels have done, that it  merely irritates me - I  am giving myself no guarantees.  His monologue from the womb has proved increasingly hard work. We shall see.
31 October 2016