Customer Reviews
A CLEVER BOY - By: DAVID BRYSON, 15 Jul 2004 
Clive James should be 65 by now, if the arithmetic of the years worksin the same way for him as for me. This volume of his memoirs, the second, was issuedin 1985, but presumably it calls on diaries keptin his 20's, the period the book covers, so one can't really gauge how it reflects his maturation.
His greatest strength & his main weakness are one & the same thing. He produces some brilliant one-liners, but so many of them, & so similarin style, that they become just a little wearisome over the length of even a shortish book. I became familiar with him first as the BBC film pundit & then as the television critic of The Observer on Sundays. Within the scale of a half-hour programme or a Sunday review he was absolutely unsurpassable for wit & originality. He did various other tv programmes over the years, & I rememberin particular a series on a tour he had madein eastern Europe, at the time still the Evil Empire of fond memory. There was a clip of a rock band consisting of various balding 40ish gentsin dull suits, on which James commentedin his flat Australian accent 'They don't just look like secret policemen, they sing like secret policemen'. Does that have you rollingin the aisles? It did me. It still does, & this book rarely goes two pagesin succession without something of the kind. As a writer of English he is a consummate workman on his own terms. The tone is studiously light & informal, but the expression is never careless or cheap. Indeed his other fault as a stylist is a kind of demotic pretentiousness. The relaxed & plain-Joe paragraphs are liberally larded with obscure literary & cultural allusions, & it would serve him right if some readers find this patronising. What do you make of a chapter-heading 'Solvitur acris James', for instance? I happen to recognise the reference to the ode of Horace starting 'Solvitur acris hiems' (Sharp winter melts) but not only will it totally escape many, perhaps most, it doesn't have all that much point anywayin its context.
The period narrated is from his arrivalin Englandin 1962 until just before he went up to Cambridge. As a document of an impoverished, chaotic, Hogarthian gin-lane existence it is simply brilliant. It would be hard to describe the feel of his account as precisely introspective - Rabelaisian might be nearer the mark. In saying that, I begin to suspect that James's manner is beginning to infect me too - the style of Rabelais is nothing like what you might expect from its English dictionary definition or the common usage of the word insofar as it has a common usage. Towards the end I thought I detected a distinctly deeper tone. I wonder what he could really do if he really tried.
The Second Part of The Clive James Autobiographies - By: , 31 May 1999 Clive James' Falling Towards England covers his life from leaving Australiain the late 1950's through his university yearsin London. An absorbing read, it covers James's inability to hold down a job, a relationship, & his ability to hold down an awful lot of alcohol. Written in a style that occasionally grates with its use of quotes from authors you may or may of never heard of, James seems to want the reader to see just how intelligent he is, having been to Cambridge on a postgraduate basis. Nonetheless, a solid read, that will have you chuckling away like I did most of the time.
