Read in 2006: Book 54
Untold Stories – Alan Bennett
This is one of those occasions when I’m not actually sure what I can add to what’s been said already. As an illustration of what I mean here are some of the reviews. The Daily Telegraph said: “This thick book is so full of good things they could sell it for twice the price.”
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And The Times: “I have never read a book of this length where I have turned the last page with such regret.” The Guardian: “My normal reaction, when faced with 600-odd pages of prose to review, is a groan of despair; when it’s Bennett’s prose, it’s ‘goody.’” I particularly liked the statement made by the lady in The Glasgow Herald (and I suspect Mr Bennett might well feel the same): “He can find more drama in a cup of Darjeeling than others could in a household of nymphomaniacs.” It’s a hefty read at nearly 700 pages, and yet you never think it is too long or do anything other than wish you had another 700 pages to go. (I have, after a fashion, as soon as a certain massive online book retailer pulls its corporate finger out of its corporate arsehole and delivers my copy of Writing Home.)
The book is a miscellany of essays, diaries and lecture notes and never failed to keep me interested, amused and entertained. By its very nature some bits were better than others – I thoroughly enjoyed the art section which some readers have claimed to find boring, but it is a subject that interests me anyway. On the other hand, having previously read ‘The Lady In The Van’ in a delightful edition that I’d like to call a ‘Penguin 60′ except for the fact that it wasn’t published by Penguin, I didn’t come away from this book much better-informed on the subject of Miss Shepherd than I was already.Then again, Seeing Stars is an essay about the experience of growing up with 30s and 40s cinema that could not be more tailored to my interests if it had been specially commissioned.
However the best bits were undoubtedly the most personal – marvellous sections of reminiscence and family history which, in the hands of such a skilled writer, take on a whole new tenor and significance as well as their bald value as social history and as an insight into what shaped the outlook of one of our most important contemporary writers. It appears that much of this made it onto paper courtesy of a very nasty health scare – the ‘average rock bun’ of the title was a doctor’s pithy description of a cancerous growth in the author’s bowel – and the feeling that if he didn’t get all this down on paper pretty quickly he may never get the chance. And, as he points out in the introduction, after a “somewhat speculative” unauthorised biography was published in 2001 he was not prepared to let someone else have the last word.
The result should dispense with any notion that Bennett is somehow a ‘dull’ or ‘cosy’ writer – much of what he treats on here is raw, direct, emotional and brutally honest, not least in his description of the painful toll that mental ill-health and dementia has taken on his loved ones – and, by extension, him. From many writers this would make for very difficult reading but here of course it is leavened with such wit, skill and humanity that quite the opposite is true. In the introduction he observes: “There is other stuff in the book which, while I was writing it anyway, I did not expect or want to see published in my lifetime. I had no objection to it being read, I just didn’t want to be in the room at the time… a death sentence, like moving house, meant the tidying had to be done and done quickly: there was a deadline. My earlier misgivings about what I was prepared to see published in my lifetime now seemed almost laughably irrelevant: none of it was likely to be published in my lifetime, so where was the problem?”
And I think that the imposition of this deadline, fortunately for all of us not Mr Bennett’s ultimate one, has produced a brilliant book. If life is too short to read rubbish, rest assured that you won’t be wasting a second here.
The book reviewed by Simon Callow: