An amazing life, lived fully no doubt, but I got tired of it after 300 pages and set it aside. I am not sure why other than I found myself reading it sporadically, in short doses, rarely engaged over a long span of time, alas. I wanted to like it, especially to get to the section where he writes his magnum opus, God Is Not Great. And I set it aside about two weeks ago, so my memory of the book is already vague!
He came from a middle class English family, but was always precocious, a voracious reader, always writing and eventually won a scholarship to a public (private) school in Great Britain. He, like many of his contemporaries, has bad things to say about the school, from teacher incompetence, to authoritarian headmasters, to what seems endemic in British schools, buggery, to use his words. He did, however, stand out, often for questioning authority and did gain entrance to Cambridge, where he flourished immediately, especially in the political world of college life. He's an example of the dictum: If you are not a Marxist when you are young, you have no heart; if you are still one when you are old, you have no mind." His liberal, Marxist beliefs and attitudes stayed with him till his 30's, at least theoretically, as he was disabused of some of its virtues when he went to Cuba as a teen, to learn about the revolution. What he found was not quite what he thought it would be and he was happy to get out of this 'paradise.' But this shows you the kind of belief and access to power that he seems to have had all his life, beginning when he was very young.
We learn about lots of his friends who have become famous, especially his best friend, Martin Amis, also a successful writer. What stands out the most for me is his politics, as he is always interested and involved, off to where ever things were happening, whether Prague, the Middle East, interviewing Saddam Hussein, or parts of Africa. It's clear he made friends easily, was in the right circles, and almost any one of note he met liked him enough to offer him a job writing a column or whatever for their newspaper, magazine, or pamphlet. He also often took a radical view of things, though always supported by evidence, usually first hand, and his charm and intellect eventually led him to the States, for a visit first but eventually, in his late thirties, he moved to the States for good and went through the elaborate bureaucracy of getting his citizenship, which surprised me. He became an avid patriot, which was interesting, supporting Bush's war for example, something he would never have done in his early years.
He was an atheist all his life, beginning with his early public school years, often talked about it and the dangers of religion in his columns, but it's not till his book, GOD IS NOT GREAT, that he became a champion of the atheists world wide. I enjoyed his early years the most, when he was in public school. Beyond then, the book seemed to lack a narrative, jumping around his life, sometimes he was in the Middle East but you weren't sure when this was, how it fit into the narrative of his life. Dates would have helped a great deal. And I found his writing more difficult to read than a piece of fiction, perhaps because it was autobiography but it slowed me down, and I found myself reading it in bits and pieces, eventually giving up on it, alas.
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