BOOK REVIEWS

TO THE END OF THE WORLD

By Rupert Everett (Little, Brown, £20) Reviewed by Alexander Larman

Rupert Everett has always, to his credit, been the most unconventional of stars. He first emerged in the Eighties as a heartthrob in Another Country, and then, after a quiet few years, returned triumphantly in the late nineties with his acclaimed appearance in My Best Friend’s Wedding, which led to more work as a leading man. Yet his blithe lack of concern for the niceties of the film industry have led to his career being stymied or, at times, derailed altogether. The unremitting candour with which he has chronicled his misadventures, in interviews and autobiographies, has not helped. To The End of the World, his third volume of memoir, is nominally about the struggles and tribulations that he underwent while attempting to fund and then produce his passion project, The Happy Prince, a film about the final days of Oscar Wilde. Yet from the uproarious prologue, in which Everett describes a martini-soaked dinner at J Sheekey with two producers attempting to convince him to play the role of a giant’s personal hairdresser in a special-effects film (‘a little set all made of leaves — leaf sink, leaf hairdryer, leaves through the windows with leaf curtains — and me in the middle, hipsters and a green quiff, backcombing an ogre’) before he realises that he has stood up Joan Collins and Christopher Biggins at The Ivy, this is as much rambling meditation on the perks and indignities of being a B-list celebrity as it is any kind of exploration of Wilde or filmmaking.

Everett admits early on that his vanity led him to turn down the opportunity to have the film made by the legendary American producer Scott Rudin, who wanted Notting Hill director Roger Michell and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Wilde. After he played Oscar on stage, in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss, Everett became obsessed with taking the role himself, as well as writing and directing the film. After many years fruitlessly searching for funding from both British and European sources, interspersed with extra-curricular visits to countless subterranean ‘gentlemen’s clubs’, Everett eventually managed to cobble together the (mainly German) money and the film was made, with a starry supporting cast including his old friend Colin Firth as Wilde’s friend Reggie Turner, Emily Watson as his estranged wife Constance and Colin Morgan as Bosie. It was critically acclaimed, but a commercial disappointment, failing to make back even its

“Reading this memoir, it often seems as if Everett’s labour of love nearly sent him to an early grave, like his idol. Although he only gets into the nitty-gritty of the production process surprisingly late into the book, after offering brief insights into his other roles, Everett is both hilarious and revealing on the challenges of trying to mount a reasonably lavish period piece on a low budget, with him as untested director”

“Everett remains an entertaining guide to the vagaries and pitfalls of the entertainment business, although there is a surprising amount of un-ironic luvviedom present here, particularly when it comes to Colin ‘Frothy’ Firth”

modest budget.

Reading this memoir, it often seems as if Everett’s labour of love nearly sent him to an early grave, like his idol. Although he only gets into the nitty-gritty of the production process surprisingly late into the book, after offering brief insights into his other roles, Everett is both hilarious and revealing on the challenges of trying to mount a reasonably lavish period piece on a low budget, with him as untested director. He calls in favours, begs, borrows and tantrums, and eventually his Wilde is immortalised in celluloid, albeit at a time when audiences seem far more interested in less loquacious caped crusaders.

Everett remains an entertaining guide to the vagaries and pitfalls of the entertainment business, although there is a surprising amount of un-ironic luvviedom present here, particularly when it comes to Colin ‘Frothy’ Firth. It was Firth’s participation in The Happy Prince that secured much of the funding, and Everett writes about his long-standing co-star (who first acted alongside him in Another Country) with a starry-eyed, apparently straight-faced adulation not present elsewhere in the book. Firth, who took an honorific title as coproducer, ended up participating for free: a display of generosity that would have been approved of by Turner, who remained by Wilde’s side right until the bitter end in Paris, as the playwright miserably quipped that his wallpaper would get the better of him yet.

A sharper editor might have suggested a tighter focus on Wilde and The Happy Prince, but the rambling and discursive nature of the writing lends it an enjoyable appeal. And some of the vignettes are priceless. Referring to the discontented director of photography, Everett writes ‘now his forehead throbs and his eyes have shrunk, glittering with madness. I haven’t seen this look since working with that orangutan in Dunston Checks In.’

One doesn’t finish reading To The End of the World wanting to go out for dinner with Everett, but it is hard not to admire his chutzpah, wit and determination. At a time when many of his peers have either ascended to superstardom or long since given up acting, he has a unique place in his industry. Undeniably, these revealing memoirs bite the hand that feeds, but also he makes the process of acting seem tangible. Not for him the Daniel Day-Lewis-esque ‘full immersion’ into a role; he is more likely to be stopped at the airport and searched, due to the unusual prominence of the crotch on the fat suit that he has to wear to become Wilde.

It is to Everett’s credit that he meets with triumph and disaster and treats both imposters the same. If he’s more entertaining about the latter, then that’s because there’s so much more of it to go around.

REVIEW ROUND-UP

By Alexander Larman and Gustav Temple

CLUBLAND’S HIDDEN TREASURES

By Sam Aldred (Amazon, £11.99)

There have been many books written about members’ clubs, with varying degrees of veneration and snobbishness, but very few of them tend to be read by anyone other than an elite few, anxiously scouring the index for mention of their particular gentlemen’s establishment. Therefore young clergyman Sam Aldred’s new book is a particularly welcome addition to this sub-sub genre of literature, being a witty and beguiling examination of the major London clubs and their histories. Every institution that appears is represented by a particularly iconic or strange item amongst their collections – the betting book at White’s, a snuff mill in a ram’s head at the Caledonian and Gladstone’s axe at the National Liberal Club, to name but three.

Aldred, who has clearly dined and wined long and successfully at these establishments, is a charmingly enthusiastic aficionado of the world of clubland, and comes up with numerous entertaining tales about both the foundation of the clubs and some of the more bizarre and eccentric characters who have graced, or darkened, their doors. Like his fellow literary clergyman Fergus Butler-Gaillie, Aldred has a knack for the telling detail that illuminates a larger story, and this is a

captivating, page turning read that is probably best enjoyed in a leather armchair in front of a roaring fire, large glass of brandy to hand. And a plea to any enterprising publishers reading this: surely Aldred’s book deserves a wider, and more lucrative, audience than its current existence as a self-published volume on Amazon?

LONDON, BURNING

By Anthony Quinn (Little Brown, £14.99)

Anthony Quinn, former Chap interview subject, is undoubtedly one of the most purely entertaining novelists writing today. His books tend to be gripping historical yarns, with real-life characters appearing in thinly disguised form, and peppered with surprising, even startling twists. (A useful rule of thumb is not to become too attached to any of the major characters.) His latest novel, London, Burning, is very much Quinn at his best. Although it’s not a continuation to his recent trilogy of books Curtain Call, Freya and Eureka, it shares many of their characteristics: a beautifully evoked setting in late 70s London, thinly fictionalised figures of the era and a fascinating, twisty narrative.

Quinn follows the fortunes of four characters, including the aforementioned Selves, an undercover policewoman, a Northern Irish academic and a cynical broadsheet journalist. All of their stories coalesce and inform each other, as London wilts under both the stench of uncollected rubbish and the ever-present threat of the IRA’s bombing campaign, while Thatcherism offers the only hope that any of the characters have of escape. The only criticism I would have is that, coming out as it does at a time of national misery and ceaseless terror and panic, it cannot be said to offer the escapist thrills that perhaps we all long for. Yet, when life returns to normality this will deservedly take its place amongst 2021’s most enjoyable reads.

THE TALL OWL AND OTHER STORIES

By Colum Sanson-Regan (Wordcatcher Publishing, £8.99)

Collections of short stories seem like a relic of a bygone age, when it was less difficult to get anything published at all in fiction. The recent vogue has been for new writers to publish, as their first published work, a collection of linked short stories with a common thread, making it as novellike as possible. Irish writer Colum Sanson-Regan bucks this trend by returning to the short story in its purest form, with no particular links between each of the 12 tales.

The range of settings is extraordinary: a roadside tacos joint in Latin America suddenly ripped apart by a truck accident and the consequences to the wounded owner and her daughter; frisky shenanigans behind the scenes during the filming of an interview with a highmaintenance female pop singer in China; the return of a recently released mental patient to her family home, a caravan park in Wales, where she witnesses the eponymous (and mythical) tall owl; and my personal favourite, the way a fetishised walking stick covered in feathers becomes a symbolic talisman for the breakdown of a fatherson relationship, in some undisclosed Eastern European country.

This young Celtic buck Sanson-Regan has a natural talent for telling yarns in measured, crisp prose with a touch of magical realism about it; the stories are so dense in imagery, setting and detail that each one could easily have been a novel in itself and they are best read only one at a time, with a pause for breath before the next one. Sanson-Regan clearly has a great literary future ahead of him, if this 175-page collection is only a glimpse into his febrile imagination.

DEVILS, LUSTS AND STRANGE DESIRES

By Richard Bradford (Bloomsbury, £20)

There is no obligation for a biographer actually to like their subject, but there is a duty for them to do their research properly. Mr. Bradford achieves neither, producing a virulently nasty hatchet job on a subject who has been written about twice previously, by Andrew Wilson and Joan Schenkar. Bradford’s tome, published to mark Highsmith’s centenary, is less than half the length of either previous biography, and he shamelessly plunders them both for details that Wilson and Schenkar painstakingly extracted from the huge volumes of Highsmith’s journals and diaries. The book was written in 2020, when international travel was practically impossible, so it is doubtful that Bradford was able to get to Switzerland at all, where the Highsmith archive is held in its entirety. Bradford’s introduction savages the personality of Highsmith, giving the reader scant reason to read on, but then he goes one further by declaring that most of her books are pretty awful as well. He shows little evidence of having read any of them, by copying his notes from the previous biographies – his scathing dismissal of This Sweet Sickness, one of Highsmith’s most accomplished novels, even mis-spells ‘Annabella’ as the name of the female protagonist. How this slipped by a sloppy editor at Bloomsbury can only be explained by the biography being rushed out in time for the centenary of its subject’s birth, which is the flavour of the entire, mercifully brief book. But the time has come for a reckoning, and we are not alone in dismissing Bradford as a talentless hack – Craig Brown calls him the ‘Professor of cut-and-paste’. It would generally be a better business for the world of literary biography if this Uriah Heep of letters were never published again.

Book Reviews

I SAW HIM DIE

By Andrew Wilson (Washington Square Press, £16.99)

The author of this Agatha Christie homage is the subject of our main interview, in which he discusses his biography of Patricia Highsmith. Since that book’s publication in 2003, Mr. Wilson has not been idle, producing further biographies of Alexander McQueen, Sylvia Plath, Harold Robbins and the survivors of the Titanic. He also, among other fictional exploits, pens mystery novels in the style of Agatha Christie and this is the third one in the series. The heroine and reluctant detective is Christie herself and the setting is a remote country house on the Isle of Skye, replete with suspicious butlers, glamorous sirens and sinister members of the secret service. I have not personally read an Agatha Christie novel since childhood so cannot comment on how accurate the pastiche is, but reading it purely as a historical thriller is certainly convincing. Unlike many such works, the social and sartorial references to 1930s aristocratic society are spot on, and the complex web of characters – naturally stranded in the house while the police investigate a murder or twain – is handled deftly. The use of Agatha Christie as the protagonist is a clever twist on the homages we have seen elsewhere by other writers, to PG Wodehouse and Ian Fleming, among others, which simply attempt to prolong the existing canon. I Saw Him Die adds a biographical element that breathes new life into the original author, as well as prolonging the life of her literary works. n