Meeting the Devil: A Book of Memoir
Various
[Windmill Books]
Richard Coe once observed that in a memoir – or at least a *good* memoir – ‘the writer is, as a character, essentially negative or at least neutral.’ Meeting the Devil consists of 29 pieces of memoir drawn from The London Review of Books since 1979, whose writers have more or less followed Coe’s call for self-effacement. The memoirists’ attention marches tirelessly outward, ranging across the private curiosities and public matters of poker games, human cell reproduction, Arabic resistance and North Korean dictatorship. The pieces vary wildly in tone and texture: Frank Kermode paints his wartime Merchant Navy experiences with gleefully broad, whimsical strokes, while Keith Thomas and Richard Wollheim offer fastidious, fussy chronicles of (respectively) the historian’s working methods and a repressed childhood presided over by a richly complex father figure.
Certainly, this can get into pedantic – even priggish – territory, and there are some duds; pieces that are bleak, banal or both. Allon White’s sickbed review of his novel is both moving and plodding, and Mary-Kay Wilmers’ ‘About Men’ is simply unengaging. Yet for the most part, the collection consists of brave and energetic writing that confronts dire life situations with fascination and a healthy sense of the absurd. Standouts include Joe Kenyon’s livid account of his time in the Yorkshire mines, and Andrew O’Hagan’s deeply uncomfortable recollections of childhood power games and youthful cruelty. These pieces show the act of remembering as brutally provocative.
Words: Gillian Moore
